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MAGNET INSIGHTS
Exemplary Professional Practice
CECIL A. KING, MS, RN, CNOR
The newly revised Magnet Recognition Program places greater emphasis on improving patient outcomes.1 Within the new model are five components:
Transformational Leadership;
Structural Empowerment;
Exemplary Professional Practice;
New Knowledge, Innovations, and
Improvements; and
Empirical Quality Outcomes.1
The 14 Forces of Magnetism2 also are listed under these five components.
The Exemplary Professional Practice component offers opportunities for perioperative nurses to showcase their interventions to improve patient outcomes. This column describes one such initiative taken by perioperative nurses.
DEVELOPING PRACTICE COUNCILS
I was fortunate to have the opportunity to begin my practice as a perioperative clinical nurse specialist (CNS) at the first facility in the nation to be awarded Magnet recognitionthe University of Washington Medical Center (UWMC) in Seattle. The UWMC was granted Magnet status from the American Nurses Credentialing Center (ANCC) in 1994 as a Magnet Nursing Services Organization for its excellence in nursing practice and patient care. My experience at that facility taught me that achieving Magnet status is not an end, but rather the beginning of a continual process toward achieving nursing excellence.
Not long after UWMC was awarded Magnet recognition for the third time in 2003, nursing leadership developed
local practice councils (Figure 1). These councils were a mechanism to further autonomous practice of nursing within the domains of professional development, clinical practice,and research formedaround either specialty orservice lines (eg, perioperative care, ambulatorycare) and modeled afterthe larger medical center-wide ProfessionalPractice Council (PPC).
The co-chairs of the localpractice councils sit onthe hospital-wide PPC.
This model provided a two-way mechanism for the transfer of nursing knowledge and practice issues across UWMC and its various entities. It was this structure and process that led to exemplary professional practice that demonstrates the Magnet forces of
Consultation and
Resources: Force #8,
Autonomy: Force #9,
Quality Improvement: Force #7, and
Quality of Care: Force #6.
The following description of the Periop...