 It has been another busy and exciting year for nursing at Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center. We have accomplished many new improvement initiatives and observed the maturity of systems and processes that we began last year. We’ve encountered many challenges along the way, but through our empowering new collaborative model, we have worked our way through them and elevated our practice and our environment to a continuously higher standard.
We have realized many successes this year, the most outstanding of which is the continued development of our Department of Nursing and unit-based councils. This process has fortified the foundation of our nursing organization, making our nursing care and services solidly evidence-based. This has resulted in a maturing of nursing autonomy and interdisciplinary collaboration and has promoted individual and collective professional achievements.
We have continued to be successful in our recruitment and retention efforts, keeping our vacancy and turnover rates low and essentially eliminating the need for supplemental agency nurses. And the collaborative care transition model of care delivery has proven to be effective in the areas where it has been fully developed, producing best practices for other units to follow.
We have officially received Magnet® recognition on August 15, 2007. Our extensive evidence document chronicles what we, as nurses, have accomplished both individually and collectively. It sends a clear message to ANCC and to our patients—that Penn State Hershey Medical Center is a premier provider of compassionate, safe, and innovative clinical care.
I am so very proud of who and what we have become through our Magnet journey, and I look forward to continuing our pursuit of excellence through empowerment. |
