In May, Salinas Valley Memorial Healthcare System achieved the gold standard for nursing practice – American Nurses Credentialing Center (ANCC) Magnet Recognition®. This designation highlights SVMHS nurses who are truly inspired and who carry out our mission and vision every day. The recognition also provides an outward and visible sign to our community about our continuous commitment to excellence in healthcare. It is a designation earned by only about 9% of hospitals across the United States.
What Magnet® Means for Patients
Magnet Recognition® requires nurses’ demonstrated access to and engagement in education and professional development through every stage of their careers and an environment that empowers them to have greater professional autonomy. Nurses at Magnet® institutions make confident and effective decisions at the bedside and lead their colleagues toward excellence.
For our patients, this means they can be sure they are receiving the highest-quality care, provided by nurses who are continuously working toward new levels of excellence and who are fully supported in their quest. Numerous studies have shown that Magnet® hospitals offer patients better clinical outcomes, safety and satisfaction with their care experience.
In a Magnet® hospital, collaboration and positive working relationships across disciplines are highly valued and expected. Nurses at institutions that meet rigorous Magnet® standards are more likely to stay with their healthcare system, report greater career satisfaction and feel fully supported in their efforts to provide patient-centered, evidence-based care that meets the highest standards.
What Magnet® Means for Our Community
In 2016, Salinas Valley Memorial Hospital embarked on the work required to achieve Magnet® designation. This began with the development of key foundational elements that continue to be woven into our culture, such as the formation of a shared governance structure – a leadership and decision-making model that promotes and supports professional autonomy, creation of a data-driven culture and development of a professional practice model – a schematic depiction of how nurses practice, collaborate, communicate and develop professionally to provide the highest quality care. We began implementing nursing peer review and peer feedback, created the infrastructure for nursing research and evidence-based practice, established reward and recognition programs like the DAISY award (which began in 2015), and formulated a nursing strategic plan. These elements provide the framework for our professional practice culture and support our nurses’ professional growth, autonomy and clinical excellence.
The Journey to Magnet Excellence® served to transform our healthcare setting and deliver additional benefits to the communities we serve. Among those benefits are our innovative programs that support the region’s diverse population, including Spanish-language grief support services for Spanish-speaking families who lost loved ones during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our nurses were also commended for taking Spanish classes provided by SVMHS, either in person or through an online program, to enable them to provide more culturally sensitive care.
We were also recognized for our unique collaboration with the Grower-Shipper Association in efforts to reduce the spread of COVID-19 among agricultural workers. In the initiative, our nurses provided health-promoting education for this high-risk population right at their job sites and offered twice-daily monitoring for workers who were ill or quarantined.
Our nurses’ devotion to providing innovative and improved patient- and family-centered care of the highest quality is not just award-winning. It improves outcomes, as verified by outperforming national benchmarks in preventing central line-associated bloodstream infections in patient care units and preventing falls with injury in all practice settings. Our nurses also demonstrate compassionate care, as illustrated by our Heart in a Bottle Program, which ensures that the last EKG tracings of patients who pass away in the care of Salinas Valley Memorial Hospital are placed in a bottle to be given to grieving families.
