For the fifth consecutive year, Boone Health has received the Magnet Award, the nation’s highest honor for nursing excellence.
The hospital was certified Tuesday by the American Nurses Credentialing Center for once again meeting rigorous standards.
“We’re the only facility in mid-Missouri that has Magnet designation, so it’s really special for us,” said Shannon Kuczynski, chief nursing officer for Boone Health. “You have to go all the way to coastal Missouri, to Kansas City or St. Louis, to see other facilities that have Magnet designation.”
Kuczynski, who celebrated her second anniversary of service on the day the hospital was honored, said the tenacity with which the hospital operates is what sets its nurses apart.
“We’re a learning organization,” Kuczynski said, “which means we learn from our failures, not from our successes. So we fail and we try again. That’s the definition of tenacity.”
Magnet-recognized healthcare organizations have higher patient satisfaction rates, lower 30-day mortality and failure-to-rescue rates, and higher job satisfaction among nurses.
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“It means we’re providing good nursing care,” said Lori Hudson, a nurse practitioner at Boone Health.
“When patients come in, they want to be seen by a doctor, but most of what they’re actually seeing is our nurses and technicians,” Hudson said. “So just knowing that they’re seeing a great nurse who can tell them what they’ve done that day puts patients at ease and makes them feel more comfortable and well-cared for.”
Only 618 hospitals worldwide have achieved Magnet recognition. Boone Hospital was first awarded the honor in 2005 and was recertified in 2009, 2014 and 2019.
“Magnet status is incredibly difficult to achieve, so to potentially achieve it five times in a row is quite unusual for a hospital,” Boone Health CEO Brady Dubois said.
It will be another five years before Boone Health can apply for Magnet recognition again, but work is already underway to obtain a sixth designation, Dubois said.
“We follow our protocols, we do our research, we see how Magnet is changing and what their focus is and we try to stay on top of it,” Dubois said, “but the most important thing is that we provide excellent care based on the results and the journey that got us there.”
