Foreword

In 1969, Nurse José Pacheco dos Santos started the Portuguese Society of Rehabilitation Nurses. Nine years later, on December 20, 1978, this Society became the current Portuguese Association of Rehabilitation Nurses (Associação Portuguesa dos Enfermeiros Especializados em Enfermagem de Reabilitação - APER), which this year celebrates its 40^th anniversary. He was undoubtedly a man of great vision when initiated an Organization that has remained active throughout all these years, under the same statutory principles. It clearly deserves gratitude from all of us.

APER has managed to keep alive the spirit of these professionals, who, through their practice, have contributed to society in general by recognizing them more and more, as professionals of excellence who contribute every day to improving people's Quality of Life.

Experiencing these last years of APER has been a unique experience!

The proximity to highly qualified nurses who voluntarily sacrifice a large part of their time and family in favor of the Association has allowed rehabilitation to be taken to various national and international spheres, leaving a heritage that must be respected and energized. All lives are made of history and this is ours that makes us very proud.

Keeping the objectives always present, throughout this middle age, we celebrate by paying homage to all the professionals who made up the Association in the name of their Presidents.

We created the Sales Luís Award which aims to recognize all initiatives for the dissemination and expansion of Rehabilitation Nursing. We launched the Portuguese Journal of Rehabilitation Nursing to stimulate scientific evolution and we implemented a Repository of Rehabilitation Nursing open to everyone, to register scientific works.

People will always be our greatest asset sharing this trip with us and offering the world with their capabilities:

It is not only the Association that has to be congratulated, but also all the Rehabilitation Nurses.

Thank you so much for helping us and especially those ones who need us most.

I leave you a challenge: “We are Happier to Act than to React” (Catalão, 2014).

Farewell!

Editorial

The path to be followed by nurses in the reinforcement of specific knowledge in rehabilitation requires a great participation in the dissemination of studies, practices, and sustained reflections in order to ensure that rehabilitation nursing has particularities, which certify a differentiated practice based on knowledge.

In Portugal, it is expected that rehabilitation nurses have Differentiated Skills, i.e., knowledge, skills and attitudes that respond to the needs in the various fields of intervention, adding expertise and the development of knowledge in an area to the nurses' skills of differentiated intervention that does not conflict with the common and specific competences of the specialist nurse (Regulation no. 556/2017).

It is important that the understanding of our role as a specialist nurse does not abandon the guidelines for a practice beyond the technical executions that require specialized knowledge, such as: caring for people with special needs, throughout the life cycle, in all contexts of care practice; training the person with a disability, activity limitation and/or participation restriction for the reinsertion and exercise of citizenship; maximizing functionality by developing the person's abilities (article 4, Regulation no. 125/2011).

Progressing on the knowledge in rehabilitation nursing leads to a wealth of problems that we must reflect or investigate far beyond the day-to-day we experience, it is a challenge where we have to incorporate the common competences of specialists, meaning, the ethical and legal aspects, continuous improvement (quality and safety) and particularly care management, but in a strict relationship with the rehabilitation of people.

In a flash about the short journey, we could say that it is necessary to encourage each rehabilitation specialist not to close on himself, but to bring to public his experience of reflection on practices or research, as some colleagues have done. In this number, we have ten published works, where we can find four areas of impact for the intervention of nurses, presenting methodological studies, close proximity studies with particularly neurological and cardiorespiratory diseases, as well as works centered on people in need of rehabilitation and, finally, articles centered on the profession.

As we read what rehabilitation nurses investigate, or are concerned about, we have the delimitation of specialized knowledge and approaching to a reality where we have to add leadership in the cases we intervene, an intense force on a work that allows promoting a successful life for the people we care for, in addition to technical interventions that ensure independence and empowerment to be peers in the teams where we work.

As diving into an endless ocean that constitutes the interventions of rehabilitation nurses, we find here and there in the writings the strategies to intervene in people with disabilities, but also in caregivers and families, the emergence of the resource of evidence to support decisions and the concern with the quality of life of those we care for.

A challenge for each reader is the ability of each one to read beyond the lines presented in the articles, as they are just a summary of what the authors understood to be significant to share with everyone and the reviewers validated that they were useful ideas and consistent results to be part of the body of our magazine.