New directions for EJCC

Abstract

Over the past 20 years the European Journal of Cancer Care has occupied an important niche in the cancer research publishing arena. Whilst no journal can claim ownership of any particular area, we believe our strength lies in multidisciplinary approaches to cancer control. As new models of cancer treatment and follow-up emerge, the importance of multidisciplinary approaches appears to be growing. There's no doubt things have changed over the last several decades; in the UK, for example, it's now taken for granted that newly diagnosed patients will have their treatment considered by a multidisciplinary team, with a range of healthcare perspectives examined. While we must continually strive for better evidence to underpin these approaches (Taylor et al. 2010), they are likely here to stay. It's now recognised that the treatment of cancer patients is multi-faceted and requires a joining up of health and social care. It requires co-ordination between a range of specialist cancer services, community based outreach services and primary care. The impact of patients’ social circumstances is much better recognised along with the need to address important issues such as family finances and occupational issues. Good multidisciplinary care requires considerable effort to bring the very broad range of players, including oncologists, nurses, carers, GPs, allied health care professionals and providers of social care together. Patients with cancer have complex healthcare needs and disaggregated models of care do not address these needs well. The current issue of our Journal demonstrates this complex landscape of cancer services, with an eclectic mix of research topics and methodologies; as always, multidisciplinary approaches to cancer control feature highly; we have a number of papers on survivorship, including a helpful framework for rehabilitation in cancer survivorship (Pearson & Twigg, pp. 701–708) and an examination of relationship dynamics amongst Danish cancer survivors (Assing Hvidt et al., pp. 726–737). Psychological issues relating to cancer also feature frequently in our journal, and this issue includes papers on depression (Aukst Margetić et al., pp. 807–815) and psycho-oncology research in China (Chambers et al., pp. 824–831). What kind of journal do we want to be? First and foremost we want to publish high quality research in areas with significant potential to have positive impacts on cancer outcomes in patients. By our nature, we have a limited focus on laboratory based studies and, while we encourage a range of methodologies from clinical trials to complex intervention studies, qualitative research and mixed methods approaches, we don't intend to publish individual case studies or case reports. Beyond our aspiration of improving cancer outcomes, we wish to engage closely with our research community and provide a ‘researcher-friendly’ vehicle for publication of high quality research – that involves good feedback to our contributors and swift turn-around of submitted papers. We don't intend to be obsessed by impact factors (although we won't complain if our ‘IF’ increases!). Over the coming months, we are planning a number of themed issues and guest editorials. These will address some of the ‘big issues’ mentioned above. We will also encourage submissions from developing and resource poor regions of the world – after all the majority of the world's burden of cancer comes from these regions (and they are producing a growing number of high quality studies). As we emphasised in our previous editorial (Knott et al. 2013), we wish to promote high quality submissions to our Journal; we will strive for quick turnaround times and, indeed, rapid rejection of papers which don't meet the mark. So we have lofty ambitions; we have a new editorial team and are in the process of recruiting new members to our editorial board. We hope our readership and our authors are ready to join us on this journey!