Soins Aides – Soignantes

About Soins Aides – Soignantes

Overview

Soins Aides-Soignantes is a French-language professional journal published by Elsevier Masson in Paris for the aides-soignantes — the nursing assistants and healthcare support workers who deliver most of the hands-on, day-to-day care in French hospitals, care homes and home-care services. It carries print ISSN 1770-9857 and online ISSN 2214-9449, appears six times a year in combined two-month issues, and is catalogued by Elsevier under the journal code SASOI on its EM-Consulte platform and on ScienceDirect. Volume numbering reached volume 23 in 2026, a sequence consistent with a 2004 launch.

The journal belongs to Elsevier Masson’s long-established Soins family of nursing titles, but it is written for one profession specifically. Where its sister title Soins addresses registered nurses, Soins Aides-Soignantes addresses the aide-soignant’s own scope of practice: hygiene and comfort care, mobility and transfers, nutrition support, observation and reporting of changes in a patient’s condition, accompaniment at the end of life, infection prevention, and the relational skills that structure work with patients, residents and families. Each issue is built around a substantial thematic dossier, supported by practical technique sheets, professional news and training and career guidance, so that a single issue serves simultaneously as continuing education, as a reference for daily practice and as exam-relevant reading for students in training.

Although it is a professional practice title rather than a research journal, Soins Aides-Soignantes is indexed in Scopus, where coverage runs from 2005, and it appears in the SCImago listings for nursing. Its readership figures, circulation and influence sit inside the francophone health-professional press: it is one of the very few periodicals anywhere written exclusively for nursing assistants, a workforce that is large, essential and rarely addressed directly by publishers.

Journal at a Glance

The Profession the Journal Serves

To understand this journal, it helps to understand the French aide-soignant. In the French health system the aide-soignant works under the responsibility of a registered nurse and provides the continuous, close-contact care on which patient experience largely depends: helping with washing, dressing, eating, moving and toileting; making beds and maintaining the care environment; observing and reporting pain, confusion, appetite changes and skin condition; supporting patients before and after procedures; and accompanying people who are dying, together with their families. It is one of the largest occupations in French healthcare, present in every hospital ward, every EHPAD (residential home for dependent older people), every long-term care unit and every home-care service in the country.

Training for the role is delivered in dedicated institutes, the instituts de formation d’aides-soignants (IFAS), and leads to the diplôme d’État d’aide-soignant. Students and newly qualified staff therefore form a natural second readership alongside experienced practitioners, and a third group — trainers, nurse educators and care managers — reads the journal both for its practice content and for material they can reuse in teaching. The journal’s editorial formula is calibrated to that mixed audience: clinically grounded, plainly written, and always tied to gestures and situations the reader will meet on the next shift.

History and Place in the Soins Family

Elsevier Masson is the French health-sciences arm of Elsevier and the publisher of the Soins family, a group of professional journals that has structured French nursing publishing for decades. The flagship title Soins serves registered nurses, and companion titles serve paediatric nurses, psychiatric nurses, nurse managers and gerontology teams. Soins Aides-Soignantes was created within that family to give nursing assistants a title of their own, recognising that their training needs, legal scope of practice and daily concerns differ from those of nurses and deserve dedicated coverage rather than a corner of a nursing journal.

The journal’s numbering tells its own story: with volume 23 running through 2026 (issues 128 to 133), the title has been appearing without interruption since the mid-2000s, and Scopus coverage is recorded from 2005. Over that period the content has tracked the evolution of the profession itself — the growth of home care and hospital-at-home services, the ageing of the French population and the expansion of EHPAD capacity, successive reforms of aide-soignant training and certification, infection-control lessons from epidemic crises, and the increasing attention paid to the recognition, grading and career development of a workforce that French health policy publicly describes as indispensable.

What Each Issue Contains

Every issue of Soins Aides-Soignantes opens with professional and public-health news — regulatory changes, health-policy developments, congress and association news — and then turns to its centrepiece: a dossier, an in-depth thematic file that examines one practice area or one care situation from several angles. A dossier might take up the care of people with dementia, nutrition and swallowing difficulties, pressure-area care, support for informal carers, or the diversification of housing and care arrangements for older people; the individual articles inside it combine knowledge summaries, field reports from named services, and reflective pieces from practitioners, so that theory and ward-level reality appear on the same pages.

Around the dossier sit the journal’s practical instruments. Technical and practice sheets (fiches) set out, step by step, how to perform or support a specific care act safely and in line with current recommendations. Regular sections cover the full span of professional life: training and exam preparation for students, career management and mobility for qualified staff, occupational health and the prevention of the musculoskeletal injuries that are endemic in care work, legal and regulatory points that affect daily practice, and book and resource notices. The publisher’s own description of the formula emphasises exactly this pairing: a background dossier plus technical sheets that let readers consolidate knowledge of a practice, a care situation or a condition, wrapped in regular coverage of everything that makes up the aide-soignant’s professional exercise.

Subject Coverage

The journal’s subject centre of gravity, as reflected both in its issues and in its bibliometric classification, is general nursing-assistant practice with a strong geriatric and long-term-care emphasis. Recurring themes include care of older people and people living with dementia, in institutions and at home; basic care techniques and hygiene; nutrition, hydration and oral health; mobility, falls prevention and safe handling; pain observation and comfort care; palliative and end-of-life accompaniment; infection prevention and control; care of people with disabilities; mental-health support and the therapeutic relationship; communication with patients and families; teamwork with nurses and the wider care team; and the organisation of care in hospitals, EHPADs, rehabilitation units and domiciliary services. Training, professional identity and career development form a second, permanent strand of coverage, reflecting the journal’s student and trainer readership.

Editorial Model, Access and Readership

Soins Aides-Soignantes is an editorially led professional journal: content is commissioned and written largely by practitioners, trainers and health professionals working in the field, and is reviewed by the journal’s editorial team for accuracy, currency and practical usefulness, rather than generated through the unsolicited research-article pipeline of a scholarly journal. That model suits its function. Its articles are short, structured and practice-facing, and its authority comes from the publisher’s medical-publishing standards and from contributors who do the work they describe.

The journal is sold by subscription in print and digital formats through Elsevier Masson’s channels; individual and institutional readers access the digital edition through EM-Consulte, Elsevier’s French health-professional platform, and the title is also present on ScienceDirect under the code SASOI. The publisher’s 2026 media documentation confirms the continuing rhythm of six combined issues a year (January/February through November/December), a print format of 21 × 29.7 cm, a target readership of nursing assistants in the hospital, medico-social and home sectors together with students, and annual ScienceDirect downloads in the region of ten thousand — figures that describe a small-circulation, high-loyalty professional title rather than a mass-market magazine.

Indexing and Bibliometric Standing

Despite its professional rather than academic orientation, the journal is a Scopus-indexed serial: coverage is recorded from 2005 to the present, and SCImago classifies it in Nursing (miscellaneous), where it sits in the fourth quartile with an SJR of around 0.10. Reported h-index values differ between bibliometric compilations — the Scopus-based SCImago profile and other aggregations do not count the same citing universe — which is normal for a French-language professional title whose citations come mainly from francophone nursing literature rather than from the international research press. For librarians and researchers, the operational facts are the ISSN pair (print 1770-9857, online 2214-9449), the SASOI code, and continuous publication by Elsevier Masson; citation counts should be read as indicators of presence in the nursing literature, not as the measure of this journal’s professional usefulness.

Not to Be Confused With L’Aide-Soignante

Researchers and librarians should distinguish Soins Aides-Soignantes from L’Aide-Soignante, a different Elsevier Masson monthly that also addresses the same profession. L’Aide-Soignante carries print ISSN 1166-3413 and online ISSN 2772-8048, appears monthly, and has its own editorial team and issue sequence on ScienceDirect. The two titles coexist in the same publisher’s catalogue and are aimed at overlapping readers, but they are separate serials with separate ISSNs, frequencies and archives; a citation to one is not a citation to the other. The present record, identified by ISSN 1770-9857, is the bimonthly Soins-family title, Soins Aides-Soignantes.

Themes in Recent Issues

The journal’s recent dossiers show how closely it tracks the lived priorities of the French care workforce. Ageing dominates, as it does the profession’s workload: recent coverage has examined the diversification of housing for older people — shared and accompanied housing arrangements, family-based accommodation for older adults, and the practical question of what ageing at home can realistically mean today — reflecting a national policy push to offer alternatives between the private home and the EHPAD. Alongside that sit the perennial clinical themes of the aide-soignant’s day: support for people living with dementia, whose behaviour and communication needs are explored from the carer’s side of the relationship; nutrition and hydration in frail older people; prevention of falls and of pressure damage; accompaniment at the end of life; and the observation skills by which a nursing assistant is often the first professional to notice that a patient is deteriorating.

A second recurring strand is the profession’s own condition. Articles address training reform and the experience of students in IFAS institutes, the organisation of teamwork between aides-soignantes and nurses, occupational strain and injury prevention in a job built on lifting and transferring, and the public recognition of care work. This dual focus — how to care, and how the carer is trained, supported and valued — is the journal’s signature, and it is why trainers and managers read it alongside front-line staff: an issue can be used at once as bedside reference, as classroom material and as a snapshot of where French policy on the care workforce is heading.

The Journal and the Recognition of Care Work

French health policy debates of the last decade have repeatedly returned to the aides-soignantes: to shortages in EHPADs and hospitals, to pay and grading campaigns, to the expansion of their role in home care as the population ages, and to reforms of their initial training intended to raise the profession’s standing. A dedicated professional journal is one of the instruments through which such a workforce develops a collective professional identity — a place where its members are addressed as knowledge-holders rather than as auxiliaries in someone else’s publication. Soins Aides-Soignantes performs that function inside the respected Soins brand: its dossiers treat the aide-soignant’s observations, relational skills and technical gestures as subjects worthy of the same editorial care that the family’s flagship title gives to nursing science, and its technique sheets codify good practice in a form that can be standardised across thousands of wards and care homes.

For researchers in nursing and health-workforce studies, the journal consequently has value beyond its citation counts. Its two decades of issues constitute a documentary record of how the French nursing-assistant profession has described its own work — which tasks it claims, which difficulties it names, how its training has changed, and how its relationship with the nursing profession has evolved — material that is difficult to find in English-language sources and largely absent from the international research press.

For Librarians and Researchers

Cataloguing notes: the serial is a bimonthly (six combined issues per year), not a monthly; the title is correctly rendered Soins Aides-Soignantes with hyphens as shown on the journal’s own platforms; the publisher of record is Elsevier Masson SAS, Issy-les-Moulineaux; and the online edition is reached through EM-Consulte (journal code SASOI) and ScienceDirect. Holdings statements should use the print ISSN 1770-9857 and online ISSN 2214-9449 as the controlling identifiers, since the title’s words are shared with the distinct monthly L’Aide-Soignante (ISSN 1166-3413) in the same publisher’s catalogue. Article-level citation in the French style gives the journal title, year, volume and issue — for example, volume 23, issue 128, January/February 2026.

How Practitioners Use the Journal

In daily use, the journal functions on three levels for its readers. On the ward or in the care home, its technique sheets and dossier articles are a quick, trustworthy reference when a care situation is unfamiliar — a new type of dressing to support, a resident whose dementia-related behaviour has changed, a family conversation that needs care. In training, IFAS students use its dossiers and news coverage to connect classroom teaching with placement experience and to prepare for the assessments of the diplôme d’État, while trainers draw on its articles as ready-made, current teaching cases. At the level of the profession, its career and policy coverage helps a workforce that is geographically dispersed and often isolated — home-care aides above all — feel addressed as members of a single national profession with shared standards and a shared voice. Few journals anywhere are built so completely around one support occupation; that singularity, sustained over more than twenty volumes by a major medical publisher, is the core fact of this journal’s identity.

A Note on Language and Reach

The journal publishes entirely in French and is not translated, which bounds its readership to the francophone world — France above all, with readers in Belgium, Switzerland, Québec and francophone Africa where French-model care training is used. That linguistic focus is a deliberate fit to its purpose: care gestures, institutional names, training structures and legal references in the journal are those of the French system its readers work in, described in the words they use at work. International bibliographic services nonetheless carry its record in full, so the journal is visible to nursing-workforce researchers worldwide even though its full text addresses a French-reading profession.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Soins Aides-Soignantes? A French-language professional journal from Elsevier Masson written specifically for aides-soignantes (nursing assistants), covering care practice, training and professional life in hospitals, care homes and home care.

What are its ISSNs? Print ISSN 1770-9857 and online ISSN 2214-9449. On Elsevier platforms it is identified by the journal code SASOI.

How often does it appear? Six times a year, in combined two-month issues (January/February, March/April, May/June, July/August, September/October, November/December). Volume 23 runs through 2026.

Who publishes it? Elsevier Masson SAS, the French health-sciences publisher within Elsevier, based at Issy-les-Moulineaux near Paris. It is part of the Soins family of nursing journals.

Who reads it? Practising nursing assistants in hospital, medico-social and home-care settings, students in IFAS training institutes preparing for the diplôme d’État d’aide-soignant, and the trainers and managers who teach and supervise them.

Is it a research journal? It is primarily a professional practice journal — thematic dossiers, technique sheets, news and career content, editorially reviewed — although it is indexed in Scopus (from 2005) and listed by SCImago in nursing.

How is it different from L’Aide-Soignante? They are two distinct Elsevier Masson titles for the same profession: Soins Aides-Soignantes is the bimonthly Soins-family journal (ISSN 1770-9857); L’Aide-Soignante is a separate monthly (ISSN 1166-3413).