A Note from the Editor

On February 23, 2004 Meharry Medical College and Johns Hopkins University Press (JHUP) were the hosts of a luncheon at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, launching the new publishing relationship between JHUP and the Journal and the new affiliation between the Journal and the Association of Clinicians for the Underserved (ACU). Attended by approximately 100 friends of the Press, the Journal and ACU, the luncheon was a festive occasion at which authors of Journal articles and representatives from Capitol Hill joined Meharry President John J. Maupin Jr., DDS, ACU Board President Kyu Rhee, MD and Journal Board member John Chissell, MD to address the crowd. Appropriately, as Del. Donna Christian Christiansen's (D-VI) top aide Aranthan S. Jones noted, the event occurred on the birthday of former Black Congressional Caucus leader Lewis Stokes (D-Ohio) (the founder of the Caucus's annual Health Braintrust) and during the 125^th anniversary of the publication The Philadelphia Negro by W.E.B. DuBois and colleagues, a book that inaugurated scholarly sociological and public health attention to the African American community. We are proud and happy that the Journal community was able to stand alongside this esteemed company during Black History Month.

Looking ahead, we would like to issue a Call for Papers for the Journal's May 2005 issue (JHCPU 16.2). We are planning for that issue to include papers fitting the theme of Transdisciplinary Care, one of the hallmarks of ACU. This is the Journal's first foray in recent years into dedicating an issue to a particular topic. We hope it becomes the first of many.

Some of our readers will be unfamiliar with the term transdisciplinary care, so we offer this description. A transdisciplinary health care team might include participants from such fields as nursing, pharmacy, nutrition, social work, and physical therapy as well as medicine and dentistry. Transdisciplinary care goes beyond interdisciplinary care in that the team of practitioners serving a patient or client is understood (i) to be in close communication with one another, (ii) to have integrated their services with one another's to make care maximally efficient and effective, and (iii) to be open in principle to some cross-disciplinary education and practice. These characteristics of the transdisciplinary team can lead to increased quality of care (especially due to improved communication among the team of caregivers and the integration of services), increased efficiency (by eliminating duplication of paperwork or clinical work by different practitioners), and greater provider satisfaction (through the increase in decision-making capability in patient care for team members). For more description of transdisciplinary care, please visit the ACU website (http://www.clinicians.org).

To be a candidate for inclusion in the Transdisciplinary Care issue, papers must be received by November 15, 2004, in order to allow time for peer review and production. Whether the paper is written with the term transdisciplinary care explicitly in mind, or simply is written on a subject that in some way fits the description, we will welcome it as a submission. The Information for Authors provided at the end of this and every issue should be followed for these and all other papers submitted to the Journal. The Call for Papers should not in any way be taken as a message that papers on other topics should be withheld; send those, too.

Finally, a number of readers have responded to the invitation in JHCPU 15.1 to review books recently received by the Journal. More books are listed at the end of this issue. Fewer readers have responded to the invitation to respond to papers published in the Journal through Letters to the Editor. We welcome such letters as we hope to build a regular place for exchanges between authors and readers in the pages of the Journal.