Visuomenės sveikata (Eng. Public Health)

ISSN 1392-2696
Editor-in-Chief dr. Romualdas Gurevičius, Institute of Hygiene

The first issue of the journal Visuomenės sveikata (Public health) was published in 1996 at the initiative of Vytautas Jurkuvėnas, director of the Institute of Hygiene. Lilija Genytė, head of the Information and Communications division, contributed a lot to the establishment of the journal.

The journal is intended for scientists, students, health care managers and administrators, public health specialists, educators, doctors and other persons interested in health problems of populations or its individual groups and the factors affecting it.

During the 25 years of the journal’s existence, the publisher has not changed – it is published by the Institute of Hygiene. In the first period of publication, 2 issues were published per year, since 1999, the journal has been published quarterly.

The first chairman of the editorial board of the journal was its founder – the director of the Institute of Hygiene dr. Vytautas Jurkuvėnas (1996-1998), who contributed to the development of modern public health science in Lithuania and announcing its results.

From 1999 to 2001 the chairman of the editorial board of the journal was director of the Institute of Hygiene, assoc. prof. dr. Robertas Petkevičius, who at the same time was the head of the World Health Organization office in Lithuania and helped to increase the internationality of the magazine.

Since 2001 the chairman of the editorial board of the journal was prof. Julius Kalibatas, who expanded the journal’s topics with the contribution of primary health care to the development of public health science, and held this position until 2006.

Since 2007 until 2008 The Journal’s Editorial Board was headed by prof. of Faculty of Medicine, of Vilnius University, epidemiologist Kęstutis Žagminas, who devoted considerable attention to improving the quality of the journal’s articles, especially in the fields of epidemiology.

In 2007, when the magazine’s founder Vytautas Jurkuvėnas returned to the Institute of Hygiene, he again became the chairman of the Editorial Board and held this position for seven years.

Since 2014 in April until today, the journal is managed by prof. Romualdas Gurevičius, who dedicated his professional career to chronic disease epidemiology and social medicine.

The executive editor of journal since 2003 is dr. Virginija Kanapeckienė. In addition to representatives of the Institute of Hygiene, members of the editorial board include scientists from Vilnius University and the National Cancer Institute.

In 2007 after the Institute of Hygiene was headed by for Remigius Jankauskas, the journal changed its format and design and added new non-scientific sections – “Editorial “, “Public health practices” and “Methodical material” (not a permanent section), in which is published information about the most important political events or problems in the field of public health, examples of good practice and good experience, ongoing international or European Union support projects, methodological and practical recommendations and guidelines. The journal has two scientific sections – Literature reviews and original articles.

It publishes articles written in Lithuanian and English. The journal has a permanent list of reviewers (from public health, psychology, and other fields) who contribute to improving the quality of journal articles. If necessary, the journal publishes special issues of the journal – supplements dedicated to a specific topic (e.g. radiation protection topic) or to present conference materials (e.g. materials of the international conference Public Health Current Affairs). Since 2005, the journal has been indexed in the Index Copernicus database.