Communicating with impact: strategies and best practices

Magnet Status

In the world today, health care is probably one of the most important rights a human being should be able to expect. In fact, the quality of health care offered at any given time can mean the difference not only between illness and health, but even between as much as life and death. For this reason, all health care personnel are subject to a code of ethics based upon the Hippocratic oath, which in essence focuses on maintaining health and well-being, or achieve these as quickly and as far as possible. This is also the underlying for the recent addition of Magnet status to healthcare providing institutions.

The term "magnet" was first applied to health care settings in 1982, when the American Academy of Nursing used it to refer to the phenomenon of "attracting and "retaining" nurses within high quality work environments (Aiken, n.d.). By 1990, the importance of the term grew to become part of an accreditation system known as Magnet Recognition. This was awarded to institutions that provided the best environment for nursing practice. But the history of the principles behind this recognition reward can be traced even further back than the 1980s. Florence Nightingale was the first to draw a proven parallel between hospital conditions and patient mortality.

Nightingale's investigations, for example, revealed that the mortality rate in British military hospitals during the Crimean War peaked in February 1955 at 43% of the cases treated. Nightingale began implementing her reforms in March, which results in a mortality rate of only 2% by September of the same year.

Sadly, patient safety even in today's hospitals, is not at as high a level as might be desired. There are still more preventable deaths than administrators should expect. For this reason, researchers today have taken a page from Nightingale's book by comparing mortality rates with various conditions nurses and patients face in hospital environments (Aiken, n.d.). So, for example, a good interrelationship among healthcare team members, along with individual factors such as nurse burnout can affect patient outcomes favorable or unfavorably.

One significant finding is that nurse burnout is as high as 43% in the United States, with other countries following this number to a greater or lesser degree. Burnout in nursing is a very dangerous phenomenon, which can be associated with preventable errors, adverse health outcomes, and even death.

Aiken (n.d.) also notes nurses' perceptions regarding patient outcomes in good vs. poor work environments. In better environments, for example, medication errors are 73% less likely, patient falls with injuries are 90% less likely, and Nosocomial infections occur 55% less.

For these reasons, it his highly important to ensure a better work environment for nurses to ensure better patient outcomes, and Magnet provides an excellent and uniform way to do this. Aiken (n.d.) notes that Magnet Hospitals tend to have lower mortality, morbidity, and complication rates, while maintaining higher patient satisfaction, higher staff job satisfaction, and lower overall costs. In addition, Aiken (n.d.) notes that, with better environments, as many as 40,000 deaths that occur in hospitals each year could be prevented by closer attention to the environments in hospitals.

Principles of the American Nurses Credentialing Center (ANCC)

To ensure the favorable outcomes mentioned above, and to ensure that only deserving hospitals receive the recognition inherent in Magnet, the ANCC (2013) has established a number or principles they consider in terms of applicants for Magnet. These included transformational leadership, structural empowerment, exemplary professional practice, new knowledge, innovations and improvements, and empirical outcomes.

In terms of leadership, for example, this means constant change to ensure the growth of the healthcare organization. Leaders must have appropriate vision and the energy to help their teams bring the vision into being. This relates directly to structural empowerment, which refers to the empowerment of staff within the healthcare setting. Programs and policies must be set up in a way that helps staff perform better work and encourage them to think critically for the benefit of the organization. This will necessarily lead to exemplary professional practice, especially with the work that involves nursing practice directly. New knowledge, innovations, and improvements are then the consequences of such exemplary practice. The final component, which is "empirical outcomes" will be one of the most important future determinants of a company's adherence to Magnet principles.