More than a scientific journal for cardiac rehabilitation and prevention

In early 2002, a brave and far-sighted decision of the Executive Board of the Italian Working Group of Cardiac Rehabilitation and Prevention (GICR) gave birth to this journal which, with the new Cardiac Section of Monaldi Archives for Chest Disease, has become the official organ of the Group. We feel honoured by the recent decision of the current GICR Executive Board to entrust us with the Editorship of the Cardiac Series of the journal for the next three years. The excellent work done and important results achieved by Raffaele Griffo and the Editorial Board that collaborated with him in the first two years of the journal’s life, constitute a heritage that we will find difficult to match. At the same time we trust that our personal commitment and enthusiastic determination that we have shown from the outset, since 2001, as promoter of “Archives operationâ€, will enable us, together with the support of the Executive, of the new Editorial Board and of all those who give us the privilege of their active collaboration, to preserve and consolidate the legacy that we have inherited. The role of cardiac rehabilitation within the medical panorama is now recognised for its consistency in terms of facilities, hospital beds, specialized personnel, patients, clients, workflow. But over and above these figures, its importance also in terms of scientific production cannot be denied, as well as its vitality and integration, in concrete, organizational terms, within the cardiology network. At the same time the dynamics of complex systems – of which the health systems of developed countries constitute a typical example – inevitably pose for health professionals and the various players concerned a series of problems and issues specific to cardiac rehabilitation that need to be evaluated, debated, and subject to experimentation and innovation. It is our task to orient the editorial policy of the journal to take up these challenges facing cardiac rehabilitation today, e.g. the relationship with other domains of rehabilitation, with the field of cardiovascular prevention, the pressure to de-hospitalization and the need to develop and evaluate new effective and sustainable processes of care. In forming the new Editorial Board of the Cardiac Series of Monaldi Archives we have taken the above aspects into account. We hope they will serve as the basis for an organic development of the journal’s editorial policy.