New directions for the Revista/Journal

Those of you who have read the most recent issues of the Revista Panamericana de Salud Pública/Pan American Journal of Public Health will have noted an unprecedented event in the history of this publication: the creation of a new Editorial Board.Composed of ten renowned public health professionals and researchers from all the subregions of the Western Hemisphere, this advisory group assembled for the first time in Washington, D.C., on 5 and 6 October 2000 and met with the Revista/Journal staff and with high-level officials of the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO).The wealth of the contributions and the productivity of the discussions in that initial meeting met our highest expectations.In fact, deliberations on the journal had scarcely begun when it became clear that there was a need to first address a fundamental question: What is the Revista/Journal?In its direction and content, is it independent of the Organization to which it belongs, or is it primarily an institutional journal, intended to disseminate PAHO's policies and to convey scientific information filtered through the "lenses" of the Organization?But in the end the feeling was unanimous: the Revista/Journal cannot and should not be just one of those things or the other.Because of its special position between those two extremes, the Revista/Journal is unique and is able to provide readers something that no other public health journal from the Americas can.The Revista/Journal is, on the one hand, a forum for the dissemination of the work of independent researchers, whose papers it subjects to rigorous peer review.On the other hand, its links with PAHO enable the Revista/Journal to offer its readers a select and balanced repertory of national experiences that can serve as models and sources of inspiration to other countries struggling to address their health problems and to improve their health systems and services.It is worth recalling that globalization has increasingly brought public health under the domain of a growing number of entities-the State, the corporate sector, the insurance industry, unilateral and bilateral organizations, research centers, the education sector, and organized civil society.In its role as an international organization that advises countries and offers technical assistance throughout the Region, PAHO's leadership position enables it to follow the pace at which our entire Hemisphere and each of its countries is advancing in health.This double identity as an autonomous publication and one that functions from a broad institutional perspective enriches the Revista/Journal and makes for its uniqueness.In this new millennium, we face the urgent need to adapt the Revista/ Journal to the demands of a new epidemiologic, social, economic, and political scenario and of technical and scientific advances that are coming at a dizzying pace.We staff members of the Revista/Journal recognize the publication's diverse audience: public health professionals, researchers, general and specialized health practitioners, health services administrators, social scientists, nursing personnel, university professors, medical students, and a wide range of health technicians, all scattered throughout the vast territory of the Americas, from the Canadian tundra to the southern tip of South America.No single publication can fully cover the thematic range that such diversity demands.An enormous variety of specialty journals exist for this purpose.Instead, the editorial staff focuses on enhancing and strengthening those features of the Revista/Journal that make it a distinctive publication, unique among others of its kind.In our conviction that statistics are of little value unless they serve as the springboard for moving forward from theory to practice, we seek to limit the publication of descriptive articles that provide local epidemiologic data, and to favor articles on interventions that appropriate evaluation methods have shown to be effective, or that describe new techniques and cast a new light on particular issues.We will also seek to include more pieces on the study and evaluation of health systems and services, from a qualitative, administrative, and economic point of view.In short, from now on the Revista/Journal will prioritize materials that, by their nature and subject matter, bear a direct or indirect influence on decision-making and the formulation of health policies.And with a view to providing our readers with research findings that are usable, one of our immediate goals will be to publish more

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