Magnet status

[dec2007]

My hospital was recently awarded "Magnet" status. I'm interested to know how other nurses view this distinction. Is it a valid reflection of the quality of patient care and employee satisfaction? Would anyone care to share their impression of the process leading to a facility receiving the award? Just interested in hearing the experiences of nurses from various regions. Thanks for your input.

[ixchel]

Magnet can be an incentive that drives positive change for nurses, and it can also be nothing more than $2,125,000 logo for the hospital's website that does nothing to improve a nurse's practice environment. Unfortunately more often than not it seems to be the latter. I think this is partly due to a misunderstanding of what Magnet is; it's not an award for nurses, it's an award for hospital and nursing leadership that provides the environment, support, staffing, decisional role, etc to provide excellent patient care. Staff nurses are supposed to use it as leverage to improve these factors and make their leadership earn the award rather than helping them get the award without earning, which is unfortunately what happens sometimes.

Holy crap! Does it really cost that much?!

[llg, PhD, RN]

Holy crap! Does it really cost that much?!

It doesn't cost that much to get the certification itself ... but it often costs that much for the hospital to improve working conditions so that the hospital gets the award. For example, in order to get the Magnet certification, the hospital may start paying for nurses to go back to school ... or improve its staffing ratios ... or sending more nurses to conferences (e.g. the annual Magnet Conference) ... or paying for nurses to become certified ... etc. That's where a lot of the $2M goes -- stuff like that. Some of it is good stuff for nurses: other stuff, not as good.