About Heilberufe

Heilberufe

Heilberufe, with the full title Heilberufe – Pflege einfach machen (formerly Heilberufe – Das Pflegemagazin), is a German trade journal for the nursing and care professions, published eleven times a year by the Springer Medizin Verlag in Berlin, part of Springer Nature. Published since 1949, it is one of the oldest continuously appearing nursing journals in the German-speaking world. It serves as the official journal for members of the Deutscher Pflegeverband (German Nursing Association) and the Anbieterverband Qualitätsorientierte Gesundheitspflegeeinrichtungen (provider association for quality-oriented care facilities). With a print run of 10,132 copies in 2023, it addresses nursing professionals across all care settings, from hospitals and residential care to outpatient services, under the motto "making nursing simple."

Overview

Heilberufe is a practice-oriented professional magazine whose target group spans the entire nursing workforce: registered general and pediatric nurses, geriatric nurses, trainees and students in these fields, and nursing managers such as ward and care-service directors. The journal networks the various disciplines, from health and pediatric nursing through general nursing to geriatric care, across clinics, care homes, and ambulatory services. Its editorial program combines nursing practice, everyday working life, career perspectives for the nursing professions, and a job market, making it both a professional companion and a career medium.

The magazine's sections cover practical nursing topics, reports from the working reality of care, and perspectives on the development of the nursing professions, including the challenges of staff shortages, digitalization, and the academization of nursing. Special issues on selected topics supplement the regular program. The journal maintains an online archive of issues dating back to 2007, accessible to non-subscribers in limited form, which gives its content a reference function beyond the current issue. The certified distance-learning format PflegeKolleg allows readers to earn recognized continuing-education certificates and collect training points with the German Nursing Council.

History

The first issue of Heilberufe appeared in 1949, just four years after the end of the Second World War, in a Germany rebuilding its healthcare system. Over the following decades the journal appeared under changing subtitles and with various publishers, reflecting the consolidation of the German specialist-media market. Its longevity makes it a witness to the entire postwar history of professional nursing in Germany: the establishment of nursing as a recognized profession, the professionalization debates of the 1970s and 1980s, the introduction of long-term care insurance in the 1990s, and the current transformation driven by demographic change and digitalization.

A significant milestone came with the journal's integration into the Springer Medizin portfolio, placing it within one of the world's leading scientific publishers. Since January 2017, the sister title Pflegezeitschrift, founded in 1948 as the Deutsche Schwesternzeitung, has also belonged to Springer Medizin, and the two journals together form a major information platform for professional nursing with an outstanding job market. Heilberufe's role as the official journal of the Deutscher Pflegeverband and the provider association gives it an institutional anchoring that distinguishes it from purely commercial titles: it carries the newsletters of the German Nursing Council and the Federal Association of Teachers in Health and Social Professions as inserts, making it a distribution channel for the organized nursing profession.

Coverage and Content

The journal's content is organized around the working life of nursing professionals. Nursing-practice articles present applicable knowledge for daily care work, from wound management to dementia care, written in a form that can be transferred directly into practice. Reports from the nursing everyday give voice to the profession's experiences, including the ethical and emotional burdens of care work: a recent editorial addressed "moral distress," the inner conflict nurses feel between time pressure, institutional rules, and their own standards, and how teams can share the burden and turn pressure back into strength.

Career-perspective articles address the structural challenges of the profession: the skilled-worker shortage, rising demands on care, digitalization, and academization, as well as concepts for structuring nursing careers for the future. The job market connects employers with the scarce resource of qualified nurses. The certified PflegeKolleg distance-learning section, for which readers can earn a recognized certificate and at least nine continuing-education points, integrates professional development into the magazine. Special issues take up selected topics in depth, and the journal's connection to the Heilberufe congresses in Hamburg and Berlin, whose abstracts appear in special editions, links the magazine to the profession's scientific discourse.

HeilberufeScience

Since 2008, initially as a supplement and since 2010 as an online edition, the journal has been complemented by HeilberufeScience, a nursing-science journal whose contributions undergo peer review. Published quarterly, it carries original research, reviews, scientific brief communications, and professional correspondence, addressing scientific institutions and all interested persons and facilities in nursing management, nursing education, nursing science, public health, gerontology, and geriatric care, in both inpatient and outpatient settings.

HeilberufeScience aims to promote scientific exchange in these fields and the professionalization of the nursing disciplines. In combination with the Springer Medizin journals Heilberufe and ProCare, it offers a distinctive opportunity to promote theory-practice transfer, bridging the gap between nursing research and the working reality of care. The existence of a peer-reviewed scientific journal alongside the practice magazine reflects the academization of nursing in Germany and gives the Heilberufe brand a presence across the full spectrum from bedside practice to university research.

Organization and Ownership

Heilberufe is published by the Springer Medizin Verlag GmbH, based at Heidelberger Platz 3 in Berlin, part of Springer Nature. The editorial office for Heilberufe, Pflegezeitschrift, and HebammenWissen is located there, with Katja Kupfer-Geißler as editor-in-chief (responsible), Heike Ottow as managing editor for Heilberufe, and a team of editors and technical editors. Advertising sales are handled within the publishing house, and a dedicated reader service in Heidelberg answers subscription questions.

The journal's official relationships define its institutional character: it is the official journal for members of the Deutscher Pflegeverband and the Anbieterverband Qualitätsorientierte Gesundheitspflegeeinrichtungen, and it carries as inserts the newsletters of the Deutscher Pflegerat (German Nursing Council) and the Bundesverband Lehrende Gesundheits- und Sozialberufe (BLGS). The print ISSN is 0017-9604 and the electronic ISSN 1867-1535. The 2023 print run of 10,132 copies reflects the journal's position as a targeted professional medium rather than a mass publication.

Digital Presence

The journal's digital home is the Springer Pflege portal at springerpflege.de, the continuing-education and information portal for nursing and health professions within the Springer Medizin Verlag. The portal presents the journal's current issues, editorials, and articles, with the online archive extending back to 2007. The HeilberufeScience journal is available as an online edition, and the portal integrates the brand's journals, books, and e-learning offerings into a single professional environment.

The magazine's articles are indexed with DOIs through the Springer Nature system, giving them citability in scientific contexts. Newsletters and the enclosed council newsletters extend the brand's reach into the inboxes of nursing professionals. The combination of a print journal with eleven annual issues, a peer-reviewed online science journal, a professional portal, and certified distance learning makes Heilberufe a multi-channel brand serving the nursing profession across practice, education, and research. In a healthcare system where nursing shortages dominate the policy debate, the journal's role as the organized profession's own medium gives it a relevance that extends well beyond its circulation numbers, and its archive since 2007 documents the profession's transformation in real time.