See related articles at www.cmaj.ca/lookup/doi/10.1503/cmaj.230544, www.cmaj.ca/lookup/doi/10.1503/cmaj.230665 and www.cmaj.ca/lookup/doi/10.1503/cmaj.231476
In this issue of CMAJ, we launch a new Practice series — Five Ways to Support — which will give clinician readers strategies to better support people who require care. Each article will have at least 1 author who is a patient or caregiver with direct experience of the particular health care issue being discussed.
The 2 articles published in this issue discuss how to support young carers (more than 100 000 people in Canada younger than 25 years provide 20 hours or more of unpaid care per week to a family member with long-term health conditions or disabilities)1 and how to provide safe and equitable inpatient care for transgender, nonbinary and gender-nonconforming patients.2 The latter article is accompanied by an In Their Own Words piece, a conversation with a transgender man who describes his bad and good experiences with receiving care.3
The format of the new articles is similar to that of Five Things to Know About articles that have appeared in CMAJ’s Practice section since 2010; written by clinicians, they provide readers with succinct summaries of the best evidence on managing a variety of clinical conditions (https://www.cmaj.ca/five_things). The primary audience of articles in the Practice section is health care practitioners. We hope that the Five Ways to Support articles will also be of interest to patients, families and caregivers. CMAJ articles are not behind a paywall and are freely available to all.
The new article type builds on CMAJ’s existing body of work related to patient engagement. Since 2021, CMAJ has published 8 360° Cases (articles with as many as 4 authors, 1 of whom must be a patient, caregiver or family member), which detail the differing perspectives of people involved in a health care encounter(s) to highlight interpersonal and systemic aspects of health care (https://www.cmaj.ca/360_cases), and 16 In Their Own Words articles (interviews accompanying select articles and highlighting a patient or caregiver’s experience of a health care encounter) (https://www.cmaj.ca/own_words). CMAJ editors consider that patients bring unique experiences to health care, and that clinicians can learn from their specific knowledge and skills.4
CMAJ has had a Patient Advisory Panel for several years. Current panel members bring a breadth of personal and professional knowledge in several domains — including managing the care that they or their loved ones require — but also experience with research, education and management in health care. The active role played by CMAJ’s Patient Advisory Panel in the development of and choice of format for this new article type (and another to be launched soon) has been critically important.
We provide guidance for authors interested in submitting a Five Ways to Support article — with details on the topics of interest, content, format and review process — at https://www.cmaj.ca/submission-guidelines#practice. Potential authors who wish to enquire about submitting an article may also contact editors with their specific questions by emailing PatientEngagement{at}cmaj.ca.
We are currently taking a critical look at our review process for the new article types to ensure we optimally support authors and editors to produce articles that are useful to clinicians and, ultimately, patients.
Footnotes
Competing interests: See www.cmaj.ca/staff for Andreas Laupacis. Victoria Saigle, a former employee of CMAJ, reports serving as co-chair of CMAJ’s Patient Advisory Panel and receiving travel and grant-funded contract support from the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute.
This is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided that the original publication is properly cited, the use is noncommercial (i.e., research or educational use), and no modifications or adaptations are made. See: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/