there's another thread asking "should i report this?" it seems like there's always one of those threads going. in it, a brand new nurse relates a situation that she, in her infinite wisdom and experience, finds deplorable and ends with asking either “should i report this?” or “whom do i report this to?” the answer, i think, is “mind your own business,” but there are dozens of posts disagreeing with this. “we all have duty to report,” they proclaim self righteously. “we have to protect our patients.”
these are some of the same posters who perpetuate thread after thread on lateral violence, bullying, backstabbing and throwing one another under the bus. they know it happens because they’ve been bullied. bullying just ought not to be tolerated, it should be nipped in the bud. bullies should lose their jobs.
so bullying is a terrible thing . . . unless i’m doing it? backstabbing ought not to be tolerated . . . except, of course, if i’m backstabbing someone. we ought not to throw one another under the bus . . . but i’ll make an exception in the case that *i* want to “report someone.” women are all nasty, catty backstabbers . . . except for me, of course, and maybe my friends.
if bullying is such a concern, maybe we ought to just stop doing it. rather than wasting energy deciding how and where to report someone, perhaps we ought to just mind our own business. (unless a patient is in immediate danger, of course.) rather than throwing someone under the bus to make ourselves look better by comparison, maybe we ought to stand behind them, support them and if ignorance is an issue, educate them. rather than spending so much time and care on ruminating why the manager didn’t return our “hello” or the charge nurse didn’t jump up and say “good morning” when i graced the floor with my presence, maybe i ought to just cut her some slack. it’s possible that she has something other than me to think about, and it’s possible she wasn’t deliberately ignoring or being rude to me, she was just preoccupied. if we don’t like our preceptor, maybe we should just suck it up and deal -- after all, there are always going to be co-workers we don’t like. and if someone gives us feedback, maybe we ought to pay more attention to the message than the manner. after all, some people just can’t be tactful to save their souls, but it doesn’t make their feedback any less valuable. especially if you’re new and don’t know anything.
new nurses hasten to judge their more experienced colleagues as bullies and backstabbers, yet not all workplace violence is comes from seasoned professionals and is directed at newbies. a lot of it seems to come from those very same new nurses who protest public outrage about all the lateral violence they’re encountering. think about that the next time you go to your manager and request a new preceptor because you don’t like the one you have (or because you’re convinced she doesn’t like you. you know this, of course, because you can see it in her eyes, not because you’ve ever actually discussed it with her.) think about it the next time you rush to judgement about some experienced nurse who does something contrary to the way you learned it in school. maybe it's actually a better way to do it than what your instructor taught you. think about it the next time you self-righteously proclaim “that’s the kind of nurse i *don’t* want to be.” really? give it a few years and then get back to us. and surely you should think about it before even contemplating the question of whether or not you ought to report someone for anything that isn’t actually putting a patient into immediate danger. there's a lot to be said for minding one's own business. if one does that, one can be sure not to throw someone under the bus.
