magnet status

[okscrapper]

Hi. I am currently a CNA/CHHA who will be attending the Drumright LPN program this spring. I am not sure what "magnet status" means or how it improves the overall quality of patient care. What I see is pt care being done by CNA's and LPN's while RN's are bogged down by charts and paperwork. I do see the result being that LPN's are not allowed to work in those facilities, ie, SJMC, but can thrive in home health settings. I guess what I am not understanding is that the LPN taking care of the pt at home, dealing with the acuteness and acuity levels of the home care pt, under less than perfect settings, is not considered qualified to take care of this same pt while they are inhouse. Can someone make me see this logic and understand??? :typing

[okscrapper]

St Johns in Tulsa is huge on magnet status and the nurses I know who work there are not happy with the work environment or the hospital itself. They mention no support from administration, no support from nurse supervisors, large teams, working short, and lack of pt care due to all of the above. After working 12 hrs, and then staying over to chart, makes a long day.

I guess that is anywhere, but my point is that the environment has changed and no one really seems happy there. They will not hire LPN's, but have no porblem using them thru agency. Strange to me...

[lithrlndRN]

Ok I am a little late on this conversation, but I disagree with everyone who thinks magnet is a bunch of BS. It is all about how your shared governance works at your hospital (or lack of). My fiance and I are both on the magnet committee and we are going for our designation at our hospital. My fiance is an LPN and one of the most involved nurses in the committee. She is going to go back and finish her RN. Magnet is a recognition of the good care that you do as a nurse everyday at your hospital. It is no different than an award for lab, RT, or any other dept. Don't get me wrong I agree that it makes the hospital look better. If your hospital is not to your standards you should either leave, or fix it. There are a lot of things that need to be changed at my hospital, but there are a lot of amazing things we do everyday. I just don't see why any nurse would not want to be recognized for their hard work. I think what happens is that a hospital starts magnet status for all the right reasons, and then when they get the status they quit their journey to excellence. I know my hospital will never be perfect, but I do know that we will strive for the best pt care possible. Our door to cath time is less than 30 min, we are stroke certified, we have constant observers for patients who are high risk for falls or extremely confused, on our med surg floors we usually only have 4 pt mx per nurse, CCU 2 pt per nurse and open hearts are all one on ones. We have rough times, but when there is a problem we try to fix it. I know that most of you reading this think this reply is as much BS as you think magnet is, but I firmly believe in my great care towards my patients. Do you? We have been working on relationship based care (RBC) for the past year and getting ready to role it out to the staff. We all have the choice to have our opinions heard at our hospital. I highly suggest that if your hospital has not fully embraced shared governance or adopted RBC as a model of care then you should make it happen. In our RBC we have involved 14 different dept in our hospital that meet once a week. This is including everyone from dietary to med staff. We want to make sure that every dept has good communication and understands each others needs to give the best pt care possible. I hope that maybe this message has helped at least one of you understand what magnet should be about. If you have any questions for me on how things are becoming successful at our hospital I would love to share, if you have any suggestions on how to make RBC work well for us I would appreciate it.

[doink]

I have to agree with the other posts on Magnet status being BS. I work for a newly certified Magnet Status and nothing has changed. Except that the workload gotten worse due to short staffing, administration having no clue on whats going on the floor. Many good people, doctors and nurses left due to low pay and pay cuts. It just angered way too many staffs when the higher up's told everyone that they will not be receiving pay raises this year due to the recession but yet spent millions to get this Magnet status, many more for new furniture, flat screen tvs, new parking garage and new expansions of the hospital. How do you think that goes for everyone's morale? Not good. I'm not too satisfied with the Magnet status at all. And not everyone can be involved in 10 different committees, people have families and live to attend to.

[MAIDEN25]

It makes no sense to me either, and I have seen RN's seek the help of LPN's for proocedures such as cathater insertion, ng tubes, dressing changes, because they have been out of patient care and have rusty skills. Pts don't care about the endless paperwork, they want and deserve skill at the bedside. I wouldlike to be an RN for the pay, but do not want to head a team and be at the desk doing paperwork.

And half the time these new RNs have no clue how to do these proceedures. I think every RN should have to be a LPN first and have a certian amount of experiance. Now i also have to mention that there are also a lot of great RNs out there. Phasing out LPNs is the stupidest idea they have yet. Sometimes were are the backbone of the facility and the RNs take credit for things we do.