Remembering Two Among Us

Abstract

Each year, at the Annual Conference of the National Association of Pediatric Nurse Practitioners (NAPNAP), the Journal of Pediatric Health Care bestows two writing awards: The Ellen Rudy Clore Award for Excellence in Research Writing and The Leah Harrison Award for Excellence in Clinical Writing. As we continue to celebrate the Journal’s 25th anniversary, we thought it would be fitting and instructive to look back at the lives and work of these two remarkable women, both of whom have passed away and whom we continue to honor through our annual awards program. A former president of NAPNAP, Ellen Rudy Clore was a graduate of the University of Virginia, from which she received the Distinguished Alumnae Award in 1974. She also served as president of the Alumnae Association for the University of Virginia. She was active in the Florida chapter of NAPNAP and taught at the University of Florida College of Nursing in Orlando, where a scholarship has been created in her memory. A prolific scientific writer, Ms. Clore made many excellent contributions to the Journal on diverse clinical topics including physical assessment, management of common pediatric infections, and sleep disorders in children. Leah Epstein Harrison, an expert on child abuse, was a founder of the Child Protection Center (now named in her honor) of the Children’s Hospital at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx. At the time of her death at age 55 from acute myelogenous leukemia, she was associate director of the Center, which has been influential in shaping other anti–child-abuse programs around the United States. Ms. Harrison received a bachelor’s degree in nursing from Pace University and a Master’s degree in nursing from Seton Hall University before joining Montefiore in the late 1960s. She also headed the United Jewish Appeal Federation Family Violence Task Force’s Subcommittee on Children and worked with leaders in Jordan, Israel, and other countries in setting up pilot programs for guarding children against abuse. Over the years, many authors have contributed state of the science original research and clinical articles to the body of pediatric literature through the Journal and have been named recipients of the Clore and Harrison awards. To determine the award recipients, each year the Editorial Advisory Board reviews each article published in the Journal within the calendar year according to a stringent set of criteria, including the significance of the written contribution to pediatric nurses in advanced practice and the quality of the contribution to the nursing literature. The result has been an impressive compendium of research and clinical articles that have helped to build the evidence base for high-quality pediatric nursing care. Our hope is to group these collections of articles and prominently showcase them on the Journal’s Web page, http://www.jpedhc.org/, so that all of these articles might be easily retrieved. Through the excellent contributions of all of our authors, we believe that the influence of Ellen Rudy Clore and Leah Harrison in promoting the health of children continues. We are better scientists and clinicians because of the work of these remarkable women, and we are honored to offer these prestigious awards every year.