Magnet multipliers at the University Hospital Bonn

For the University Hospital Bonn:
Andreas Kocks, Michelle Kimmich, Dr. Silja Tuschy, Stephanie Tanzberger and Sarah Storton

​"We need communities whose members invite, encourage and inspire each other to go beyond themselves."
Gerald Hüther

​In fact, it should be clear that good patient care is based on expertise, communication and successful cooperation. How challenging and how much necessary "care" this objective requires can be seen by taking a look at clinical care. It is precisely the increasing density of work in German hospitals with a simultaneous shortage of necessary nursing staff that makes the relevance of communication, cooperation and joint work development repeatedly seem to fade into the background. The Magnet team at Bonn University Hospital (UKB) faced the same challenges  in their efforts to co-create the Magnet initiative together with nursing practice and to share this information. Previously established ways of communication at the UKB focused primarily on addressing employees via publications and announcements on the intranet. In addition, mailing lists, if available, as well as presentations in various exchange formats of the nursing management were used for addressing and involvement of staff. All these information and exchange channels meet the challenge that the information must also reach the clinically involved nursing staff, in addition to the high workload of the nursing work, and possibly must also transferred into action. In addition, there are technical challenges such as the lack of service email addresses, inaccessible email accounts and the need to develop a new culture of direct information, involvement, and participation of clinical nurses. 

With the experience of our two twinning partners Loyola Medicine in Chicago and OSF Healthcare Saint Francis Medical Center in Peoria, we at UKB decided to introduce so-called "Magnet multipliers", following the international concept of "Magnet champions", at the end of last year. These should be appointed from all nursing areas, i.e. wards and departments. Following the idea of shared governance, each ward/department has appointed one person from the management team as well as one nursing specialist without any additional tasks. The aim of this approach was both to involve the direct clinical nursing practice and to create the necessary possibilities for decisions and structural developments via a management person. Firstly, the call of this group caused irritation at various levels, as it left the usual path of project announcements and information with a strong focus on nursing management. However, with a few announcements by email and on the intranet and with the support of the nursing division management, we had collected a list of 157 names and email addresses in November last year and invited people to a first online meeting. 

The first online meeting of the Magnet multipliers took place in January 2023. We chose this format to enable as many people as possible to participate, both from work and from home (see figure 1 and 2). The first meeting was scheduled for 120 minutes. We used this meeting to introduce the Magnet Hospital concept to all participants in a short presentation, in order to build on this and to develop roles and possible tasks of the "Magnet multipliers" together with our colleagues. The focus shifted to the tasks of, firstly, regularly addressing quality of care and Magnet in the teams, and secondly, taking up best practice examples or development requirements in order to carry them into the superior group. Our Magnet multipliers thus act as a bridge between management and staff, as well as an innovative and creative development community. 

Figure 1 - First online meeting

Figure 2 - Discussion of possible tasks of "Magnet multipliers"

​Furthermore, the topic of email communication was discussed in the first meeting. All participants had collected problems in advance, such as the existence or non-existence of official email addresses. All challenges were gathered in the meeting in order to work out solutions with a person responsible for IT in the next meeting.
The second focus was on the joint recollection of positive events from 2022 - what did we accomplish in 2022? - what were we good at in 2022? (see figure 3). We invited our Magnet multipliers in advance of the meeting to reflect on this together with their respective teams. This feedback resulted in an impressive list of various big or small successes as well as positive results, which will now be discussed again with the wards and the leaders (see figure 4).

Figure 3 - Focus: What were positive events from 2022?

Figure 4 - Overview of positive results, as well as big or small successes

With this initiative, we hope to support the development of positive attitudes towards work and to foster greater professional pride of our nurses in the best possible way. We are already very proud of the commitment of our Magnet multipliers and are looking forward to further joint developments in the future at the multiplier meetings every eight weeks at the UKB.