Bullying in Nursing Profession: Impact on Patient Safety and Strategies to Minimize It

Running head: BULLYING IN NURSING PROFESSION
BULLYING IN NURSING PROFESSION
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BULLYING IN NURSING PROFESSION
Introduction:
Bullying as well as aggressive behavior has become quite common in the healthcare
organization. It has become one of the most serious issues as it compromise high quality care of
patients. Therefore, it has become urgency for the concerned authorities to take an active step
against it. A huge number of negative outcomes are associated with not only the physical and
mental health of the nursing professionals but also with that of the patient’s health (Gransta
2015). Therefore, this assignment will discuss this professional issue in details and help to
provide strategies that help organizations to overcome such situations effectively.
Define the professional issue
Nurse bullying is identified as one of the most important concerns that every healthcare is
witnessing in the present generation. Bullying can be defined as the repeated pattern of
destructive behavior conducted by individual called bullies with the conscious as well as
unconscious attempt to harm other individuals. Many of the nursing bullying behaviors are seen
to involve open criticism or being treated in a degrading as well as humiliating ways by the
bullies (Wright and Khatri 2015). Often individuals are bullied by ignoring them or by giving
them unfair assignments that they are not able to do due to lack of skills or due to lack of
knowledge. The bullies spread sometimes-false rumors that affect their self-esteem and therefore
the nurses tend to leave the work to overcome the stress. Some form of bullying behavior often
leads to physical violence that though present are usually rare. Researchers have conducted
different interviews of nursing professionals where they have come across varying types of
bullying types that affect the nurses mentally, emotionally, physically as well as socially. These
are verbal criticism or name-calling, intimidation as well as bullying. Ethnic joke slurs and

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BULLYING IN NURSING PROFESSION
finding faults are also some of the common weapons used by the nurse bullies on their targets.
Threatening and physical violence are also some of the reasons that turnover rates are high in
many healthcare centers (Johnston 2019).
It is very important to know who are vulnerable to be the target of the bullies and who are
vulnerable to act as bullies. Researchers have found out that new graduate nurses are highly
vulnerable to bullying by the senior nurses. Moreover, it is also found those new employees,
bank and other agency nurse and even new nurses who are transferred into the unit are mainly
considered the targets of the bullies. Other nurses who are also exposed to chances of being
bullied are those who have received a promotion or some special form of rewards or praise that
others feel to be undeserved. Moreover those nurses who feel troubled to work with others or
those who get special attention from the doctors and those who get special attention when the
nursing unit is under sever understaffing conditions are also vulnerable (Adams and Maykut
2015). The bullies are mainly seen to be motivated by a sense of superiority, resentment towards
others, the need to gossip. Moreover, a sense of envy and sense of cliquishness also make bullies
to take such activities. Bullies are mainly seen to make their targets separate from the group and
make them feel bad.
Discuss the significance of professional issue to nursing
A number of psychological as well as physical consequences remain intricately
associated with bullying behaviors in nursing. Researchers have successfully identified a number
of psychological impacts that associates with nursing and these are negative social interactions,
development of low self esteem, low inter-personal. It also involves external control beliefs as
well as other dysfunctional attitudes. In many cases, victims are seen to gradually start