How UIC Nursing alumni led UI Health to its first Magnet recognition
From the CNO to floor nurses, UIC College of Nursing alumni contributed in ways large and small to bring Manget recognition to UI Health.
Beginning the process
It could be said that she manifested it.
Tiesa Hughes-Dillard, DNP ’19, MBA, RN, had been chief nursing officer at the University of Illinois Hospital and Clinics for about two years when she told the Board of Trustees, the governing body of the University of Illinois System, that she “promised” the hospital system would achieve Magnet recognition.
It was a bold statement. Only 10% of hospitals in the world have Magnet status, a recognition from the American Nurses Credentialing Center that exemplifies the best in nursing care.
As a public, safety-net hospital — one that provides significant services to uninsured Medicaid and vulnerable populations — UI Health faced a steep climb to the achievement.
About 18 months later, Hughes-Dillard was standing on a stage, along with other hospital and university officials, in front of a packed auditorium, receiving the scheduled Zoom call from the credentialing center. UI Health had achieved the designation.
“We did everything in rapid fire because I knew now was the time to do it,” she says. “It was our time. What I promised was simply that the Magnet recognition would follow the excellence our nurses were already living.”
At that Magnet announcement in July, UI Health CEO Mark Rosenblatt described achieving the recognition as “a defining moment in the arc and history of UI
Health” — and he made sure to give credit where it was due.
The history to this point
16 years in the making
Hughes-Dillard takes a humbler view. She says the story of Magnet recognition has been in the making for 16 years, and she is quick to recognize her predecessors in the CNO role, most recently, Shelly Major, and before Major, UIC Nursing alums Dale Beatty, DNP ’17, and Jan Spunt, MSN ’83, BSN ’74.
“I was the anchor leg,” says Hughes-Dillard, who completed her DNP at UIC Nursing in Health Systems Leadership. “I picked up the baton from Jan, Dale and Shelly and I just ran. I ran to the finish line.”
The recognition from the American Nurses Credentialing Center is considered the gold standard for clinical outcomes, nursing engagement and patient satisfaction.
“Keep in mind, this is extremely uncommon for a state, unionized hospital,” Hughes-Dillard says. “Many public hospitals struggle with staffing and resources, but what the Magnet appraisers observed at UI Health was very different. They saw a system designed to support nurses so they can deliver the best possible care.”
While many hospitals rely on agency staff, UI Health uses less than 1%, meaning their patients are cared for by permanent staff who are deeply invested in the hospital system’s patients, mission and culture. UI Health also provides free-floating charge nurses on every unit, offering an extra layer of support and coordination, and a resource nurse is available in critical care areas who can be deployed immediately in the event of an emergency or surge.
The next steps
Seeing it through
When Osei Omoike, MSN ’03, MBA, BSN ’00, RN, came on board as interim Magnet program director in April 2023, she was filling a temporary role left by a departing staff member. She didn’t expect to stay in the role longer than a few months, but soon, she was digging into patient satisfaction and nurse engagement data to ensure the hospital system was meeting required benchmarks. She analyzed and graphed data specific to quality outcomes.
Omoike also collected 84 stories from nurses at all levels of the organization that illustrated UI Health’s adherence to the tenets of Magnet, which include
transformational leadership, structural empowerment, professional practice and
new knowledge and innovation.
Knee-deep in the application process, Omoike decided to stay on as the permanent Magnet director. After spending 17 years at UI Health, and before that, five years as a grant project manager at UIC Nursing, she had a personal stake in seeing it through.
“I was proud to be able to showcase the work of our nurses,” Omoike says. “We
wanted to show all the hard work that we have been doing all these years to continuously improve at UI Health. Being able to connect all the dots was such an honor.”
Expediting a process that typically takes two years, Omoike pulled the documentation together in eight months. Hughes-Dillard told Omoike to stay the course during negotiations with unionized nurses and two strikes
in 2024.
When Magnet officials came for a three-day site visit, they met with more than 700 people at multiple sessions, including nurses representing the union.
During the Zoom call in July, David Marshall, chair of ANCC’s Commission on Magnet Recognition, delivered the good news about UI Health achieving Magnet status. He highlighted a few exemplars, including: the implementation of a situational aggression screening tool and critical markers where UI Health outperformed the benchmark, such as surgical errors, data for pain, and patient education.
He also highlighted the high proportion of professional nurses with a baccalaureate
or higher degree: 91%.
Relationship to UIC Nursing
Symbiotic relationship
As the academic health enterprise of UIC, UI Health is inexorably linked to UIC Nursing. The college’s students complete many of their clinical rotations there. Faculty have joint appointments. Alumni populate the floors and leadership teams.
UI Health actively recruits bachelor’s-prepared nurses from UIC and offers tuition reimbursement to nurses seeking a degree at UIC or any state university.
“Our relationship with the hospital is symbiotic,” says Dean Eileen Collins, PhD, RN. “Our students benefit from training at an organization with such a high standard of nursing and patient care, and the hospital benefits from the expertise in research and evidence-based practice that our faculty and alumni bring.”
Hughes-Dillard agrees.
“Together, we’re preparing the next generation of nurses in a real-world academic health setting while advancing evidence-based care,” she says. “This collaboration strengthens both institutions — enhancing patient outcomes, fostering innovation and ensuring a strong pipeline of nursing talent for the future.”
More stories of alumni who helped lead UI Health to Magnet recognition
The IV whisperer
The patient had lost consciousness due to low blood sugar and needed an IV to give her dextrose, a simple sugar. But anesthesiologists, CRNAs and experienced nurses had all tried and failed to insert an IV.
And then Janelle Paguiligan, BSN ’18, RN, was called in.
Paguiligan, who had been trained in ultrasound-guided IV insertion, was able to locate the patient’s vein with the ultrasound machine, insert the IV and help her regain consciousness.
Paguiligan received the DAISY award for that case, but her work didn’t end there.
She became an integral part of a train-the-trainer initiative to certify nurses in the ultrasound-guided peripheral intravenous insertion technique, leading to wider
use of the practice in her unit.
Patients with difficult IV access can require multiple insertion attempts, resulting in added prep time, delays for surgery start and reduced patient satisfaction.
“When a patient needs multiple IV sticks, it can be very anxiety-inducing during a stressful time when patients are preparing for surgery,” Paguiligan says.
After the intervention was implemented, patient satisfaction scores increased in response to the question: “Does the staff treat patients with courtesy and respect?”
Sunu Punnoose's work to prevent falls in children
The assessor
Sunu Punnoose, DNP ’24, RN, was working as a night nurse in the pediatric intensive care unit (PICU) as she pursued her DNP at UIC Nursing.
She noticed that the hospital had no tool to assess whether pediatric patients who are younger than 19 months old were at risk for falling, even though they used one for older children.
“We see falls in the younger populations and mostly people disregard them as developmental because they’re learning to walk, but based on the evidence, a developmental fall can still cause a lot of injury,” Punnoose says.
Punnoose adds that 80% of the time, the falls happen in the presence of a parent, making education an important step in prevention.
Working closely with her DNP advisor, clinical assistant professor Susan Vonderheid, Punnoose created a plan to implement the CHAMPS fall risk assessment tool for patients under 19 months of age.
As part of her project, she created a nursing staff education presentation.
Pediatrics and PICU clinical nurses were instructed to use the assessment scale on admission and to provide education to parents using a leaflet that Punnoose created.
Since it was implemented in November 2023, only one child under the age of 19 months has experienced a fall.
Nicolas Dotson's work with patients with mental illness
The peacekeeper
Nicholas Dotson, DNP ’23, MSN ’18, RN, has years of experience working with patients with mental illness, not to mention a doctorate in nursing practice with a focus on psychiatric and mental health.
So when he reviewed an incident where a patient brutally assaulted a technician, Dotson immediately recognized the warning signs indicating the patient was at
risk for becoming violent.
But how could he give that same insight to techs, nurses and providers across the hospital?
Dotson, who is senior director of adult and adolescent inpatient psychiatry, set out to find a tool that could help nurses assess the risk of their patients becoming violent.
He found the Dynamic Appraisal of Situational Aggression (DASA), which allows providers to use seven metrics to gauge how likely a patient is to be an “imminent violent risk.”
The tool was successfully rolled out in the emergency department first, then across all inpatient hospital units. Under the new protocol, each patient is assessed every eight hours. Door signage and icons in the medical record indicate whether a patient is at high or imminent risk for violence.
Most importantly, Dotson helped implement Safe Management Plan Huddles, bringing together a multidisciplinary team to discuss violence prevention and mitigation techniques for every patient at high or imminent risk for violence.
By July 2025, one year after implementation, incidents with injury were down 65%.
This story first appeared in the 2025 issue of Vital Signs magazine.