Magnet recognition is the highest honor for nursing excellence. It reflects exemplary professional nursing practice, interprofessional teamwork, and preeminent patient care. The American Nurses Credentialing Center’s Magnet Recognition Program® credits this honor with distinguishing organizations that meet rigorous standards for nursing excellence. Today, less than 10 percent of U.S. healthcare organizations out of 6,129 hospitals are Magnet-designated.
What’s it like working as a professional excellence & magnet program manager at a distinguished, Magnet-designated hospital where this honor reflects the values and potential of their organization? Daily Nurse interviewed Angela Graves, the Professional Excellence & Magnet Program Manager at Stanford Medicine Children’s Health, about her work. What follows is our interview, edited for length and clarity.
Talk about what your role as the professional excellence & magnet program manager at Stanford Medicine Children’s Health entails.
It is an incredibly rewarding job. It involves collecting stories and insight from our nursing team and facilitating collaboration and feedback across the organization. I also focus on understanding what structures and processes can be put in place to improve nursing at the hospital. All, of course, through a Magnet lens to ensure we’re highlighting the right elements of our nursing practice. Bringing visibility to our nurses, telling their stories, and ensuring nurses have a seat at the table across the organization are also essential elements of my role. I wear a few different hats, making it such a fantastic experience.
How did your education prepare you for this role?
For me, nursing is a second career. I was a legal assistant before entering nursing. Both roles taught me much about communication, storytelling, and relationship building. In both professions, you need to be able to work with lots of different people and adapt how you write or speak based on who you’re trying to reach.
Specific to nursing, having a clinical understanding means I can put myself in the shoes of nurses and nursing leaders to understand situations from their vantage. It also means that nursing is included in the discussion as we tell our stories, celebrate our successes, and improve our operations. Stanford Medicine Children’s Health does a great job of empowering its nursing staff and ensuring they are included in committees and groups involved in decision-making across the organization.
Magnet designation is the result of intentional work by leaders, clinical nurses, interprofessional colleagues, teams, and workgroups across the organization, and in your role, you’re at the center of all that work as a key player. What is your role throughout the designation cycle?
Much of my time specific to Magnet involves creating energy and excitement around nursing and empowering nurses to share their work. There is also a task-driven side of the designation, so our work in measuring against Magnet benchmarks is vital. As a key player, I combine all our excellent work into a cohesive package demonstrating quality clinical practice, extraordinary care, and professional accountability.
Magnet designation has become one of the blueprints healthcare organizations use to attain and sustain nursing excellence. It has helped move nursing forward. How is it helping nurses make a difference?
Magnet designation gives nurses a voice and validates the work being done by nurses and nursing leaders across an organization. Nursing is a critically important aspect of health care, and it deserves to be celebrated. It also deserves to be continually assessed and improved, and Magnet provides the framework to evaluate ways to positively impact the organization and patient care at large.
The other thing I would say—and I know that nurses will understand—is that the role is very emotionally connected. It charges you and boosts your energy, but it can also be draining. This must not be forgotten. Whether it’s an award recognition, a new practice that improves workflows, or an adjustment that gives back five minutes a day, our work towards the Magnet designation unlocks opportunities for our staff.
How can nursing leaders position nurses to maximize their impact on patients while empowering them for career growth?
This topic is near and dear to my heart as someone supported by nursing leadership throughout my career. Nursing leaders must do two things: create an environment where nurses can perform their best every day, recognize the skills of individual nurses, and find ways to give them different experiences to explore these areas. This could be an interim role, a special project supporting hospital goals, committee participation, and more. Through this work, nurses can bring their perspective to new organizational areas and unlock opportunities to sharpen skills or enhance their strengths. Different projects that are great for growth opportunities include evidence-based practice projects, quality improvement, shared governance, informatics, technology-focused committees, and more. In these capacities, individuals can also serve as advocates, ensuring that innovations and enhancements to health care consider the needs of nursing staff and patients.
Another way organizations can empower nurses for career growth is to support advanced degrees and certifications. Stanford Children’s has many highly skilled and trained nurses at the bedside, as we care for such a high-acuity patient population. I remain impressed every day at the number of nurses that look for opportunities to try new things to advance their skills or to take a step up the career ladder. Our organization has a culture that encourages continual learning and offers support such as tuition reimbursement options, educational assistance, and certification resources.
Discuss the benefit of collaborative activities such as Nursing Summits.
An important part of any job is building relationships, and organizations need to be intentional about providing that time to employees. I think of it as “unstructured play,” which gives individuals the freedom to meet colleagues in a new capacity, get to know different people on a personal level, and share experiences from the trenches that help them do their jobs better.
The example of the nursing summit is a good one. Not only is there room for this unstructured time, but there is also a concerted effort to level set with one another and benchmark where the organization is while also providing a forum to share opportunities for improvement. Intentional, collaborative activities like this encourage a space for intimate relationship building while also supporting large-scale problem-solving and thought-gathering. Both are excellent opportunities for leadership to listen, learn, and apply to improve nursing practice – an opportunity that my colleagues and I at Stanford Children’s relish.
Discuss the benefits of creating programs that foster professional development and advancement opportunities (Professional Nurse Development Program).
I am reminded of the Florence Nightingale quote, “Let us never consider ourselves finished nurses. We must be learning all our lives.” This is a basic tenant of nursing. Nursing is not a static industry. Practices change, patients change, physicians change – our industry evolves quickly. This naturally opens doors for professional development opportunities. Nurses are constantly learning new things, improving their professional knowledge, and applying this education to improve patient outcomes.
The literature supports how bachelor’s and above-prepared nurses and certification rates correlate with improved patient outcomes. However, it also comes back to recognition. Many of our nurses have an innate desire to continue learning and improving their practice. While some may see a clinical ladder encouraging nurses to seek professional development opportunities, it is a way to recognize and reward their commitment and dedication to professional development and improving nursing care for many staff.
How do Shared Governance Councils and Unit-Level Committees formalize best practices?
The best part about councils and committees is that they work both ways. Committee members provide insight into nursing care at the bedside and offer a means of disseminating best practices to improve care. They are two-way communication streets in which everyone benefits greatly. While the sharing of ideas is considered standard practice, organizations must be intentional about setting up councils and committees, being deliberate about the time set aside to let individuals function in that capacity.
At Stanford Children’s, we leverage our councils and committees with a system we call rapid process improvements. We identify an area for improvement, then bring in bedside nurses to share their expertise, and partner with representatives from other relevant disciplines such as pharmacy, family-centered care, specialty departments, and more to quickly discuss the concern and identify a new standard of practice for the organization. This is just one way we evaluate a new process workflow or technology to determine whether it benefits every stakeholder involved before implementation.
Discuss the importance of keeping nursing involved in the future of healthcare (including strategic planning, technology application, and more).
A former CNO I worked with regularly used the quote “nothing about us without us” when talking about nursing participation in organizational change. This goes back to the importance of nurses sitting at the table and being involved in councils and committees. All hospitals want to innovate for the sake of employees and patients, but how do you know if you’re venturing down the right path if you don’t involve the frontline individuals who are expected to implement and rely on this technology? The best part about involving frontline nursing and nursing leaders in organizational decisions is they will tell you right away if things aren’t working. They will understand areas of improvement based on how they use or apply the solution. That input is invaluable to ensuring that every investment an organization makes in the future of healthcare is pressure-tested where it matters most – and helps deliver better patient and employee experiences.
A specific example at Stanford Children’s is our nursing technology and informatics council, which meets bi-monthly. They are a passionate and thoughtful group of bedside nurses and nursing informaticists who discuss and test technology innovation at the point of care. Because they represent almost all nursing units and departments in the organization, they can provide input about nursing care for diverse patient populations and varying degrees of acuity. This is invaluable in ensuring that new technology will work as intended for staff in various departments who may use these tools subtly differently, indistinguishable from the non-nursing staff introducing the innovation, but may have profound implications when implementing the technology.
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