Tapping Magnet®'s Culture of Innovation to Improve the Patient Experience

As incentives grow for healthcare organizations to improve the patient experience, an increasing number choose to add consumers directly into their leadership structures. In this final installment about the value of patient and family advisory councils, the senior director of quality at a large, Magnet®-recognized Texas hospital explains how tapping into a well-established Magnet culture helped the organization adopt innovative approaches that produced positive change. Based on an interview with the author, she notes that seeing basic issues through patients' eyes challenged long-held beliefs and led to improvements in a wide variety of areas. A discussion of the next frontier for patient and family advisory councils focuses on the small but growing number of hospitals that bring community members to the table to openly share, dissect, and improve issues of quality and safety.