Nurses encounter different workplace issues that impact their level of response and effectiveness in execution of their roles and responsibilities. As a core component of healthcare delivery systems, nurses play a critical role in attainment of healthy living as captured by different initiatives like the Healthy People 2030 initiative and the “The Future of Nursing Charting the Path to Health Equity,” report by the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicines. However, issues like bullying, nurse turnover and nurse shortage arise due to organizational cultures that do not support nurses (Hampton et al., 2019). As such, leaders and managers should take effective measures to resolve such issues because of their adverse effects on the performance of nurses. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the issue of bullying in nursing practice and the different steps or approaches that nurse leaders and manager can take to address the problem.
Nursing Issue: Bullying
Nurses experience workplace bullying and this can impact their performance because of its effects. In its update on bullying, The Joint Commission (2023) asserts that workplace civility entails a system value the enhances safety. Incivility expressed through bullying behavior is at epidemic levels. Again, the Bureau of Labor Statistics opine that the nursing profession is the riskiest due to high levels of incivility that nurses experience. Bullying is a core part of workplace violence in health care settings as highlighted by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). Workplace bullying, also called lateral or horizontal violence involves repeated, health-harming mistreatment of individuals by perpetrators Edmonson et al., 2019). Bullying can take different forms that include verbal abuse, threatening, intimidations and humiliating conduct, and workplace interference or sabotage.
According to the American Nurses Association (ANA) workplace incivility, bullying and violence have serious effects in nursing. The ANA contends that bullying is a widespread phenomenon in nursing. ANA describes bullying as repeated, unwanted and harmful actions aimed at humiliation, offending and creating distress for victims or targets. Nurses can experience bullying from colleagues, other healthcare workers and patients. In their study, Al-Ghabeesh et al. (2019) assert that perpetrators of bullying are past or present employees and exhibit an array of behaviors that include verbal or psychological and in fewer cases, physical abuse. Over 30% of nurses in a 2021 survey asserted that they have suffered and experienced bullying directly in their workplaces. As such, nurses, especially newly hired nurses encounter bullying with devastating effects on their long-term career prospects because of its negative effects.
Impact of Bullying in Nursing
Bullying has serious effects on individuals and even the workplace environment and an organization. Bullying not only affects nurses’ physical being but also their ability to offer quality patient care. At individual level, bullying leads to work-related health issues like depression, stress and anxiety, irritability and even sleep problem. Bullied nurses have increased chances of leaving the organization and even the nursing profession, altogether. Such happenings increase the problems of nurse turnover for the organization as it has to hire and orient new nurses to continue care provision (Sauer et al., 2018). Further, nurses leaving the nursing profession is one of the primary causes of the current nurse shortage for not just organizations but the entire health care sector.
At the organizational level, bullying leads to reduce productivity and performance of nurses. Bullied nurses experiencing the effects of this negative behavior may not come to work leading to absenteeism. Bullying affects the performance of nurses making them susceptible to medication errors which increase the cost of care and affects patient safety (Homayuni et al., 2021). The implication is that organizations have to hire new nurses or pay for overtime to replace those leaving. This leads to increased workload and poor nurse-to-patient ratios that may also compromise the quality of care offered by the organization. As such, bullying has significant negative effects that impact the overall quality of care and patient safety.
Professional Standards
Nurses, nurse leaders and nurse managers must demonstrate professional practice standards in addressing bullying and any other negative event in the workplace setting. The core aspect of demonstrating these standards is to improve the workplace environment for nurses to ascertain them of their safety. Professional standards as developed by the ANA implores healthcare organizations and providers to ensure that they contain and ad
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