West Hertfordshire Hospital Trust, England: Our Magnet4Europe Journey So Far…

​By Temitayo (Temi) Magbagbeola (RGN, RMN, BSc, MSc, MBA, PhD Student) and David Thorpe (RN, BSc, MSc), West Hertfordshire Hospitals Trust

Introduction
West Hertfordshire Hospitals Trust (WHHT) is a 610 bedded Acute National Health Service provider to a core catchment population of approximately half a million people living in West Hertfordshire and the surrounding area. Our Vision is to provide the very best care for every patient, every day. And we aim to ensure our mission statement ‘Best Care, Great Team, Best Value and Great Place’. Magnet4Europe and Us On 11th March 2021, we officially launched Magnet4Europe(M4E).

We understood the challenges of asking staff to participate in the M4E survey in the midst of the sudden COVID-19 pandemic. We used our M4E’s communication and marketing strategies to propagate the M4E project and encourage staff to participate in the survey. Accolades go to our ‘Teamwestherts’, 133 M4E surveys completed as shown in figure 1.1.

Figure 1.1 - WHHT M4E survey outcomes

Magnet4Europe and Us
​On 11th March 2021, we officially launched Magnet4Europe(M4E). We understood the challenges of asking staff to participate in the M4E survey in the midst of the sudden COVID-19 pandemic. We used our M4E’s communication and marketing strategies to propagate the M4E project and encourage staff to participate in the survey. Accolades go to our ‘Teamwestherts’, 133 M4E surveys completed as shown in figure 1.1.

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Our Support System
Working with our Twinning hospital Phelps Hospital has been an insightful and good learning curve. With any new journey, system collaboration is a must-do. The collaborative Learning meetings are instrumental in shaping our Shared Professional Decision Making (SPDM) related projects. One of the take-home messages was the impact of having a Choir SPDM within an organisation. An initiative we are trying to replicate. The England based M4E Group 1 and Group 2 meetings delivered by Prof. Jane Ball and her team provide a good platform for clarifications and sharing.

Our Three Big Outcomes
Our outcomes planning was based on consistent available data from the WHHT M4E Gap analysis and M4E survey outcome for our Trust. Achieving realistic, impactful, and measurable outcomes were key on our agenda. It was not a case of casual model of deciding on outcomes, we used a case-based decision analysis to ponder on the available data. Relating this to our Trust vision was equally important. Our conclusion provided a place for us to persuasively ask questions around education attainments, research advancement and succession planning. This formed the basis for our 3 Big outcomes below in Figure 1.2.

Figure 1.2 - Our three big outcomes

Figure 1.3 - Our M4E project structure

Our Plans
​With a deep understanding of critical success factors and economic conditions are, we want to assign tasks cautiously. However, maintaining the project's excitement is equally essential. We have recently set up working groups to support the 3 Big outcomes as shown in Figure 1.3.

​Our focus is to engage in scoping exercises and use a PDSA improvement cycle of
improvement to implement changes. Our future successes are dependent on our workforce, nursing leaders, trust management team as well as our Chief Nurse, Tracey Carter’s continued support.

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For further discussion on our M4E journey so far, please contact us via [email protected]