At Norton Women’s & Children’s Hospital, our goal is to create the premier environment for both receiving and delivering care. As nursing professionals, we work daily toward this objective, delivering exceptional care through compassion, strength, and intellect while collaborating closely with our interprofessional team members. We follow the Magnet model for nursing excellence, emphasizing transformational leadership, structural empowerment, exemplary professional practice, and innovation. These efforts consistently yield excellent outcomes.

Why Magnet is Important at Norton Women’s & Children’s Hospital

Magnet designation is the highest achievement in healthcare where nurses are the foundation.  Magnet designation validates and celebrates organizations where nurses’ voices are empowered and heard. Nurses are involved in decision making, problem solving and collaborating with inter-professional teams. The organization exemplifies and showcases the great value nurses bring to the organization. It highlights nursing excellence in practice through the work nurses do every day leading to the highest quality patient outcomes.

Transformational leadership is a dynamic style that inspires and motivates individuals to achieve improved outcomes through a shared vision. It takes a leader who supports personal growth and team development while encouraging innovation and collaboration — essential elements for successfully navigating change.

In health care, transformational leaders are invaluable to advancing nursing practice and shaping the future. They create change through innovation and motivation, whether by leading research, initiating evidence-based projects, attending professional conferences or serving on councils. These activities challenge us to evaluate how and why we deliver care.

Empowering staff to speak up, identify barriers and take part in creating solutions is the cornerstone of transformational leadership.

At Norton Women’s & Children’s Hospital, we’re fortunate to have a team of leaders who embody this approach. We foster an environment that supports leadership growth and collaboration across the system — one that promotes exceptional patient care and professional fulfillment.

Structural empowerment provides the framework for professional advocacy, collaboration, critical thinking and advancement in nursing. At Norton Women’s & Children’s Hospital, this structure ensures the voices of clinical nurses are heard, and bidirectional communication is part of our culture. Bedside nurses are empowered to make decisions that impact their practice, leading to higher engagement, satisfaction and quality outcomes.

Our professional governance model is a prime example. Unit- and hospital-based councils, led by bedside nurses, shape practice in areas such as:

• Interprofessional collaboration
• Promoting well-being and resilience
• Achieving specialty certifications
• Supporting research and evidence-based practice
• Aligning policies and standards
• Enhancing patient and family education
• Recognizing nursing achievements

Nurses lead from where they are, and we honor that leadership at all levels.

Exemplary professional practice is grounded in evidence-based practice, interprofessional collaboration, patient-centered care and quality outcomes. At Norton Women’s & Children’s Hospital, our foundation is Swanson’s Theory of Caring. A steering committee of clinical bedside nurses and nurse leaders updated our professional practice model to reflect the exemplary care happening across our organization.

Norton Healthcare empowers nurses to take ownership of their practice through shared governance and professional development. Support is available to attend professional conferences, earn specialty certifications and advance education.

This creates an environment where nurses are equipped to practice to the full extent of their license and deliver safe, high-quality, patient-centered care.

We are committed to zero harm. Our safety strategy, Reaching for Zero, ensures clinical teams have access to real-time nurse-sensitive and patient experience data. Nurses actively participate in interprofessional teams, site-based councils and safety initiatives. In 2024, we expanded our Welle behavioral safety management training and strengthened security measures to enhance workplace safety for patients and staff. We are an organization of integrity, advocacy and compassion — and there is no limit to what our care can do.

Norton Women’s & Children’s Hospital nurses are committed to the advancement of their practice and improving outcomes. They foster a spirit of Inquiry — the persistent sense of curiosity that informs learning and practice. This conscientious effort is achieved through active practice-based learning, the contribution of generating new research, ensuring safe care, improving care delivery through innovative practices, and continuously evaluating and implementing evidence-based practices.

New knowledge is demonstrated by nurses who:

• Push boundaries regarding innovative care
• Seek ways to continuously improve care
• Strive to be strong leaders and empower other nurses
• Integrate innovation and improvements into clinical and operational processes

Norton Women’s & Children’s Hospital offers a number of ways to get support, get involved and ignite your spirit of inquiry.

Each hospital has a group of like-minded nurses and staff who come together to form the System Evidence-based Practice & Research Council.

This council’s primary objectives are:

• Promote nursing, interprofessional research and evidence-based practice in everyday practice in collaboration with the System Education & Innovation Council.
• Support intrafacility research and evidence-based practice projects throughout our organization.
• Support investigators in research and evidence-based practice processes.
• Support the dissemination of research and evidence-based practice findings locally and nationally.
• Recognize nurses and interprofessional teams for their efforts in research and evidence-based practice accomplishments.

Nurses are encouraged to spark their spirit of inquiry by questioning current practice, seeking out the best available published evidence to pair that with their clinical expertise, and the wishes of patients and families regarding care. Norton Women’s & Children’s Hospital nurses promote shaping the future of care through quality practice, innovation and discovery.

The Nursing Congress is the empowering structure for nursing practice governance, which is the foundation for professional nursing practice at Norton Women’s and Children’s Hospital. The Nursing Congress ensures nurses hold the authority, accountability and autonomy to make decisions about clinical practice within prescribed legal and ethical boundaries and in collaboration with interprofessional teams. The professional governance structure provides the forum for nurses at all levels to partner in decision-making regarding the professional work environment, nursing professional practice and care delivery.

Norton Women’s & Children’s Hospital has its own branch of professional governance that functions within our facility and reports up to the same model at the system level.

As demonstrated on the model, facility-level councils all report to system-level councils.