Editorial

Abstract

In July the National Health Service (NHS) in the United Kingdom celebrated its 75th birthday -an incredible accomplishment for such a large and valuable public service.However, as the anniversary month progressed, more and more cracks emerged in the metaphorical icing of its birthday cake.These included medical consultants joining their striking junior colleagues, nurses adapting to their largely unsatisfactorily halted strike, waiting times insidiously extending, politicians remaining intransigent to suggestions that the service was teetering and service managers sounding increasingly nervous about their ability to keep any kind of service going, let alone a celebrating one.Whilst many celebratory events played out for the NHS at a more urbane level, so too did a theatrical play in London based on the life of Dr Semmelweis.He was a Hungarian obstetrician, who discovered, through observation, questioning and meticulous analysis of records, the vital importance of hand washing in preventing puerperal fever.His story, starkly portrayed in the play is both uplifting and tragic.Uplifting to a researcher because he stuck to 'the research method'identifying the problem, assembling data, testing hypotheses and evaluating the effectiveness of his solution.And tragic because, like so many research projects, spreading the findings beyond his immediate colleagues was troublesome, his peers were affronted by his findings and ignored them -the new knowledge, despite sound evidence to prove it, was largely abandoned during his lifetime at the cost of many women's and children's lives.The play was totally absorbing not least because of my interest in research implementation and how and why research gets implemented (or not).It reminded me that closing one's ears to challenges and solutions is often easier than making change -Semmelweis and some of the 75th NHS celebration cake-icing cracks depressingly coalesced.July was also a month when AI was in the news -even at our summer editorial board, AI made the agenda as we debated the pros and cons of innovations such as ChatGPT.In the spirit of JRN adventure, I mooted writing an editorial using it to see what happened.I was hesitant but as my thoughts came together around this editorial and the content of this edition of JRN, I decided to try it out.The first step was to get a coherent task for ChatGPT to do.As this edition of JRN brings together papers and commentaries on critical aspects of research and practice -establishing validity and reliability, scale-testing, error reporting and generalisation, and a Perspectives piece on the impact research ethics committees might have on participation in mental-health research, I decided research and nursing had to be in the task.

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