Dear Reader 

Welcome to the August edition of the VNJ. Whilst I am sitting here writing this the weather is glorious, and myself and my dogs are positively melting. I hope that most of you are getting a well- earned rest at some point over the summer either from work, college or university. We truly must not forget how important it is to allow ourselves some downtime and recharge our batteries.

Whilst watching many owners walking their dogs this week, in the midday heat of over 32 °C, I have been pondering how we, as RVNs, can improve owner education on such simple but life-threatening matters. If you have any thoughts or ideas on this then we would love to hear from you. I have certainly seen many practices and individual RVNs advertising the problems with heatstroke, walking dogs on hot pavements and dogs in hot cars on social media. So, why are we not getting through to so many owners?

Whilst reviewing the proofs for this month’s journal, I am again so pleased to see how much Evidence Based Veterinary Nursing is featuring in the VNJ and the article by Nieky van Veggel is very thought provoking on the subject of anecdotal evidence. It is also fantastic to see more nursing clinical research being published in the VNJ and commend Nicola Swales for publishing her clinical project with us. I hope this will encourage more of you who have done research as part of a degree programme or advanced diploma to consider publishing. We are happy to help with this and have mentors on hand to help you reduce your word count into a more manageable format for the journal. Please get in touch if you would like our help.

As always, the team work hard to provide a variety of content to appeal to all our readers but, if there is something that you feel the VNJ is lacking or a topic that you would like to see covered in more depth then please get in touch.

Author

Sam McMillan BSc(Hons) VTS(Anesthesia/Analgesia) DipAVN RVN

Editor-in-Chief

VOL 32 • August 2017 • Veterinary Nursing Journal