2014 Medical Librarians Month – Magnet Recognition

Posted by Patricia Devine on November 24th, 2014 Posted in: Funding, News from Network Members, News From NNLM PNR

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In our last entry for 2014 Medical Librarians Month, Dana Kopp describes her role in her institution’s journey to receive Magnet Recognition.  Although this brings us to the end of our contest, we are always interested in hearing your stories! Please let me know if you would like to do a guest post for Dragonfly.

by Dana Kopp, MLS
Manager – Library Services
The Learning Center
Providence St. Patrick Hospital
Missoula, MT

My involvement with our Magnet Journey began in 2009 when I was one of three people sent to a Magnet Journey to Excellence workshop in San Diego. The Nursing Shared Governance Advisory Council and Professional Development Councils had determined that they thought our nurses were ready to begin the Journey and deserved recognition for the fantastic work they do every day. The Advisory Council had begun a gap analysis and found that they really weren’t sure where we stood because there were so many unanswered questions about each Component. The gap analysis was put on hold while we educated ourselves on the process and requirements. I was chosen to attend the workshop because I had taken the MLA Getting Magnetized course a few months earlier and had more knowledge about the Magnet Components than many others.

Once we returned from San Diego we realized that while we met the requirements in many areas, our newly completed gap analysis showed that we had deficits in areas such as EBP, Research, Recognition and others. Not that we weren’t doing these things, but, for example staff didn’t realize that our policies were backed by evidence. Numerous Councils and work groups were created to address a variety of issues and I was involved in several, including the Evidence Based Practice Work Group, Research Council, and Professional Practice Model Task Force. During this time I also sat on the Professional Development and Advisory Councils as well as the Magnet steering group we called the “Keen” group, because we were keen on the staff achieving Magnet Recognition.

Our EBP and Research groups had a lot of work to do, we discovered that there was a lot of confusion about what EBP was, what resources were available and how to use them, not to mention the difference between EBP and Research. To support this process for the EBP group, I began talking to individual departments about EBP, Research and our resources — not something new as we’d done it before but it had been awhile. Our team was able to bring Bernadette Mazurek Melnyk and Ellen Fineout-Overholt to Montana for a two day EBP Conference in 2010 which really helped the momentum. In 2011, I created my “EBP for the E. B. P. (Extremely Busy Practitioner)” class which I currently still teach on a monthly basis. This class is broken into parts, the first being “Ask and Acquire”, which includes what is EBP, developing a PICOT question, Boolean basics and Cochrane’s and PubMed searching, part two of the class being critical analysis of the literature. This exposure brought a lot of recognition to the library about our resources, services and our use statistics went through the roof!

While I was very involved with the development of our EBP group, working on Nursing Research and the normal everyday business of a medical library I also became very involved with the creation of our Magnet electronic document, which is what is submitted to the Magnet Appraisers for review. During this time I was working on my Masters through UNT and happened to be taking a HTML coding class and by coincidence we were trying to figure out how we would be submitting our documentation, either in paper or by some type of electronic document. I had a lot of ideas but wasn’t sure how they’d work or if we were on the right track. Because I had so much background in the Magnet work and ideas for the document I was sent to the 2011 Magnet Conference in Baltimore in order to figure out the best way for us to write and submit this documentation. At the conference I met others who shared their documents and described their process, and I learned a ton from the presenters. From that time on I was deeply embedded in the document process: developing and testing our electronic document (which functioned just like a web page but was saved on a flash drive), writing or formatting data for the 28 Organizational Overview sections as well as a number of other Sources of Evidence (SOEs), and doing whatever was needed by our primary writer and our editor. In order to guarantee that the document would work on a variety of browsers and platforms and that all the document links worked we had to run numerous tests. Since I knew the document the best, I ran the majority of these tests.

Our document was submitted on February 1, 2013 to the Appraisers and on May 8 we were asked for additional documentation. We provided that documentation in a modified version of the original electronic document that I had created. Only a month later we received notice that we would be receiving a site visit late in the summer. On October 24, 2013 we received notice that we had received Magnet Recognition. YEAH!! But if you are familiar with Magnet, you know that it is a Journey, and that it is never complete because there always ways to improve patient care, etc. I am excited to note that the electronic document design we used has been modified into a template that is being used across the Providence System.

A year after receiving the Magnet Recognition, our use statistics are still high and my services are in demand as much as ever. The EBP Work Group also continues with a variety of projects — both in partnership with the Montana State University School of Nursing students and our own EBP project — where we develop our PICOT question. I conduct the literature search, we divide up and evaluate the literature and as a group we determine how to proceed based on those results. While it is not unusual for Librarians to be involved in the Magnet process, I don’t believe very many have been involved quite to the level that I was. At the very least, my involvement with the EBP and Research groups ensures that the library and our resources are always at the forefront of discussions around the hospital.