DESCRIBING ESSENTIALS OF MAGNETISM AND QUALITY IN HOME HEALTH by

The purpose of this descriptive study was to determine what Home Health nurses perceived to be the Essentials of Magnetism (EOM), the degree to which the EOM exists within each Home Health agency, and whether there was a relationship between quality Home Health agencies and their scores on the EOM. Home Health agencies were determined to be high or low quality agencies based on their published Home Health Compare results as obtained on the Medicare.gov website. The system research organizing model (SROM) was used as an organizing framework for this study. There is a plethora of research within the acute care setting establishing relationships between organizational attributes and quality outcomes. There is a lack of research in the Home Health setting exploring those same variables. The Nursing Work Index Revised (NWI-R) has been used in acute care research relating organizational attributes to quality patient outcomes. This instrument has also been utilized in the Home Health setting, but there have been no published psychometric analyses to confirm generalizability to this setting. Furthermore, research with this instrument has shown it to be unreliable in the acute care setting. The development and utilization of the EOM in the acute care setting provides a foundation for studies in other settings. Research in this study was conducted with two different sets of Registered Nurses in two different phases. The first phase of RNs (N = 106) determined what Home Health nurses perceived to be the EOM from the 37-item Dimensions of Magnetism (DOM) instrument developed by Kramer and Schmalenberg (McClure and Hinshaw, 2002). The top 10 EOM attributes were obtained by tabulation of the number of respondents to each