Highlighting Professional Practice

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• 2023 ANCC National Magnet Conference
• UWMC Nurse at Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital, Drogheda, Ireland
• Emerging Nurse Leader Program
• Healthy Work Environment Initiative
• Meaningful Connection Initiative

2023 ANCC National Magnet Conference

In 2023, UWMC received its 7th Magnet redesignation. This prestigious achievement stands as a testament to our unwavering dedication, clinical expertise, and compassionate care that we consistently provide to our patients and community. Our commitment to excellence not only sets a standard for healthcare but also inspires us all, and our hard work and perseverance have once again affirmed our organization's commitment to quality, safety, and patient-centered care. Our continued contributions exemplify the true spirit of nursing. It’s well worth celebrating this remarkable milestone as we progress toward many more achievements in our journey ahead.

25 nurses attended the 2023 Magnet Conference to represent UWMC and to celebrate on behalf of the whole team:

Comments from nurses who attended

“I am really thinking about how to engage staff as magnet nurses. What can we do to connect them especially since many of the things we do are already deep into magnet culture."

“It’s important to have unit-based activities, identifying champions to spearhead initiatives is essential. Have a succession plan in place in case the original champion is unable to carry out the activity.”

“I really enjoyed and valued the deep dive into health systems and leadership--it was a much different perspective than what I get day to day in my clinical role. I enjoyed my time with hospital leadership and felt proud to represent UWMC with my colleagues. Poster sessions were great!”

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UWMC Nurse at Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital, Drogheda, Ireland

Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital Drogheda , Co Louth, Ireland is months away from their "Pathway to Excellence" staff survey. In November 2023, Caron McMahon, MSN, RN, helped to inspire and motivate nursing staff on the importance of accreditation and nursing excellence.

Caron presented on behalf of UWMC, sharing the lived experience of our UWMC Magnet journey from our 1st to our 7th designation, the UWMC Shared Governance structure, and our dashboards. Class attendees had a particular interest in how the Professional Practice Model was developed, and in the ANCC Healthy Work Environment UWMC Project and results.

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Emerging Nurse Leader Program

The University of Washington Medical Center continues to recognize the pivotal role that nurse leaders play in the success of our organization. In 2023, we continued our hybrid Emerging Nurse Leader program for newer nurse managers and experienced RN3s/assistant nurse managers. This program is a part of our commitment to the development of Authentic Leadership (a key element of our Professional Practice model) and succession planning efforts.

The goals of this program are to:

• Develop authentic nurse leaders who are well-prepared for their roles
• Enhance connection to newer nurse leader peers
• Provide essential organizational resources and knowledge for newer leaders

The program consists of an online, fully paid, asynchronous curriculum of award-winning modules (Fundamental Skills for Nurse Managers) through the Association for Nurses in Critical Care (ANCC) and a monthly 2-hour, collaborative meeting with other UWMC nurse leader participants as part of a cohort. Including the asynchronous modules, the total time commitment is around 3-4 hours/month and offers a comprehensive foundation to help support newer nurse leaders at UWMC.

Content included:

• Time management and work-life balance
• Developing relationship-based, situational leadership skills
• Staff recruitment, engagement and retention
• Mentorship support from leaders within our organization
• Performance management
• Financial management
• Quality and safety
• Conflict management
• Innovation

In 2023, we graduated 16 nurse leaders from the program and attendees reported a high level of satisfaction with the course and feeling better prepared for their nurse leader roles within our organization. Two of our RN3 attendees have already transitioned to manager roles within the organization.

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Healthy Work Environment Initiative

In 2023, our healthcare teams continued to recover from the sustained impact of the pandemic on our teams and system. With the aim of being the Employer of Choice, UWMC continued to lead the way in many innovative staff-support initiatives aimed at improving retention and team member satisfaction during this challenging time in healthcare. In 2023, UWMC continued the work we began in 2021 through a system-wide initiative on improving our healthcare work environments, using the six Healthy Work Environment (HWE) evidence-based standards from the American Association of Critical Care Nurses as a framework: Skilled Communication, True Collaboration, Effective Decision-Making, Appropriate Staffing, Meaningful Recognition and Authentic Leadership.

Modeled after a similar workshop series done by Dennis Doherty, PhD, RN, NPD-BC at Boston Children’s Hospital, the goal of this immersive professional development program was to promote the HWE framework in all practice settings by engaging leaders and local, frontline interprofessional champions in identifying a need for and implementing HWE initiatives on a departmental level.

The 2023 series again kicked off in the winter of 2022 with a 2-hour workshop for leaders throughout the UWMC/UW Medicine system. More than sixty leaders attended the virtual sessions, engaging in conversations on how to continue to support our departments as we adapt to the new realities of our healthcare environment. Leaders and HWE department champions then attended the subsequent 4-workshop series throughout 2023. HWE Champions, in collaboration with their leaders, worked on projects aimed at making small, incremental changes that had big impact on their team. Projects included a widely popular QR Code Recognition project, employee of the month or quarter recognition, staff recognition boards, self-compassion and wellness retreats, team communication workshops, a staff newsletter, wellness challenges and improving break spaces. Twenty-nine HWE teams launched projects/efforts at improving the health of their work environment and 100% of participants requested that the program be offered again in 2024.

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Meaningful Connection Initiative

In the fall of 2023, two UWMC nurse leaders collaborated with multi-campus Chief Nurse Officers and the Patient Experience team to launch a multi-campus, system-wide Meaningful Connection workshop initiative to address the impact of the incredible challenges that our healthcare teams have faced over the past several years.

The US Surgeon general published a compelling report in May 2023 on the health impacts of the epidemic of loneliness in our country. Our leadership team recognized that our pre-pandemic healthcare environment was already in crisis, with workplace violence, rampant moral distress and burnout and higher staff illness and disability rates than other professions and that the pandemic had further compromised our healthcare teams. And while our operational leaders simultaneously worked to address our staffing and capacity issues, our team yearned to also offer support directly to our nursing teams. As an element of our Professional Practice Model is Relationship-Based Care, an exhaustive literature search concluded that a brief intentional connection could provide some protection against staff burnout and had the potential to improve the patient experience and quality of care.

A one-hour workshop was developed and required for all nursing and nursing support staff, offering 25 options for virtual attendance over a 6-month period. Results of literature supporting the impacts of a 30 second compassionate connection between healthcare team members and/or a patient/family were shared with opportunities for practical application in the session. Potential staff impacts included triggering positive emotion/reward centers in the brain that can counteract stress response and the potential to decrease triggered responses that lead to workplace violence. Impacts for the patient included buffering stress medicated disease, modulating the experience of pain, and the evidence-based potential to enhance immune responses and improve clinical outcomes.

Results of the post-session staff surveys indicated an overall satisfaction of 4.43 out of 5. Ninety three percent of respondents indicated they were either "very likely" or "likely" to try an intentional connection at work in the coming week. Preliminary results show an upward trend of the HCAHPS metric measuring "nurse communication" (as high as the 88.9% percentile) within several months of the launch of the program. Survey feedback also indicated a reported shift in understanding and hope for many attendees and offered what one attendee called "an impactful tool for our mental health toolkit".

The results of this workshop are important because this program offers a system-level, evidence-based, practical, and actionable strategy to address the rampant burnout, disengagement, and the subsequent impacts on patient quality and outcomes for our modern, post-pandemic healthcare teams. Future work includes efforts to continue to embed this knowledge and practice into our healthcare culture.