Being bullied

Annie Wilkes RN · Apr 9, 2015

I don't have any advice...just sorry you are going through this.

KatieMI, BSN, MSN, RN · Apr 10, 2015

One phrase advice:

GET OUT OF THERE.

ASAP. STAT. NOW.

If your health is suffering and you are actively afraid to be around these people, just write your resignation note, effective immediately. Do it before something happens with you or your patient and therefore with your license.. Do not spend a second asking yourself why whoever does or did what and why someone was so mean because there is no answer.

Document every single episode you can remember, with words, date and time and names of people eho were around and could see or hear anything at all. Get your preceptor's and the manager you spoke with phones and emails. Then leave and do not come back.

GuEsT78 · Apr 10, 2015

It is very good that you posted this request for help. I saw something similar when I worked nights in pediatric Hem-Onc, so I know just how important it is that you get relief. There are few situations in a hospital that are more dangerous for patients than staff facing hostile, critical, and uncooperative fellow staff.

First the background. Having been trained as an EMT, I worked night shift on Hem-Onc as the assistant half of a nurse/assistant team at a major children's hospital. We typically cared for seven very sick children getting treated for leukemia. Their treatments went on around the clock and were quite complex. In many cases, our patients were the sickest kids in the hospital outside the ICU and required close monitoring. If your are interested, I've described those experiences in a book, My Nights with Leukemia.

The hospital liked to hire nurses just of of school and, in addition, it's hard to get experienced nurses to work for long on night sift. I worked full-time on Hem-Onc, while several nurses just out of school took turns rotating there. Now the hospital has two units dedicated to childhood and teen cancer, but at that time Hem-Onc was one cluster of at three-cluster medical unit.

Nights were tiring, particularly dealing with children who have cancer, so nurses typically moved to other shifts as soon as they had enough seniority. Strange as it might sound, I liked the work and stayed around, in part because I was soon the most senior member of a team where experience is very important. I felt that there, more than anywhere, I could make a difference.

The trouble began with the third set of night nurses I worked with. First I should make clear that all three, while just out of nursing school, were exceptionally capable. Two were honors graduates and the third was a dedicated professional. If I had a child with leukemia, I'd be quite comfortable with having that child in their hands. The problem did not lie with them or their skills. The second set of nurses to work Hem-Onc nights had not been as well chosen. Two had to repeat their orientations, so for this third time around the administration sent their best new hires to us.

The problem lay with two older nurses on Hem-Onc's day shift. They were so ill-tempered, soon after I started, I had given them the secret nickname "rhymes with witch." Their nursing careers were unimpressive. At that hospital, talented nurses tended to move into specialized areas. They'd been at the hospital for about twelve years and were doing work that a nurse six months out of school could be doing. If I had a child with leukemia, I would not want them doing the care.

In addition, all three new nurses were young and pretty. One was happily married and so smart I sometimes wondered why she hadn't gone to medical school. One night she solved a surgical problem that had stumped two surgical residents. Another had no trouble getting the attention of male residents and the third is so attractive that, when I looked at a picture I'd taken of her later, I asked myself, "Why didn't your ask her out."

In short, those 'rhymes with witches' day nurses had ample but most unprofessional reasons to resent the night nurses. Later I would conclude that other factors higher up in the nursing administration were contributing, but their envy was clearly a factor in their harassment, which was primarily finding fault at morning report.

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Reading your description above, you sound much like those newly hired nurses. You're polite and respectful, as well as confused by your ill-treatment. Like them, I suspect you lack the confidence to fight back. The very fact that you wilt under their attacks, encourages these bullies. I remember telling myself, "If these night nurses had a bit more experience, they wouldn't let the day nurses get away with what they're doing, they'd fight back. In fact, I had little trouble with those nurses. If they attacked me, I fought back, They were reduced to carrying their underhanded attacks on me to our head nurse, who unfortunately was a bit like them.

Now for what matters. Fear of those attacks so addled the minds of those good and talented nurses that I began to fear for our patients. I'll give two examples.

The first only involved patient comfort. Each morning, when day shift showed up at 7 am, the night nurse, typically trembling with fear, went to give report to those nurses from hell, while I made a final circuit of our children making sure all was OK. One morning, I taught a CPR class to nurse after my shift and returned to the unit about 10 am before going home. The head nurse, every bit at ill-tempered as those day nurses, pounced. She claimed I'd left a boy with his sheets dirtied from a suction line spill. I knew of no such thing, but I recalled that the nurse I was working with was in the room when I passed through. I said nothing about that though.

That night I asked her if she knew what happened and she did. After I'd moved on, she went to move the boy and some stomach fluid splashed out a vent onto his sheets. It was the most obvious of things to tell me about that so I could clean it up, but she was so terrified at the upcoming report she didn't. That night I gently suggested she tell the head nurse what had happened, but didn't push her. The nurses I was working with were getting threatened so badly, I didn't mind accepting all the blame for something that was neither their fault or mine.

I worried that something far worse would happen and one night it did. A resident wrote a morphine order for a two-year-old boy who'd never had narcotics before and made a power-of ten mistake. So shaken by those day-nurse attacks, the nurse on Hem-Onc that night didn't catch the error. The morphine started about 1 am. Ninety-nine nights out of hundred, he might have died in a dark room with his parents sleeping. In his case, his parents had just flow in from Alaska, two time zones further west and were still up with the lights on when the boy stopped breathing and turned blue. It was that close.

I tell you all that, not to tell you something you don't know. You've described quite well how this hostility is harming your ability to give good care. Stress created by their bad treatment is distracting you and, in a crunch, they may not provide you with the assistance you need. I tell you that simply to point out that your response it both normal and very dangerous for you patients. If something happens, it may fall out in ways that make you look bad, but like those two incidents I just described, it isn't really your fault.

Alas, I can't make anything happen for you. In my situation, I tried everything I could, which as an assistant wasn't much, to end that clash between nurses to no avail, particularly since the head nurse was of the same critical mind. After that morphine overdose, I couldn't shake off the feeling of powerlessness any more and transferred to day shift caring for teens. In the end, that may be an option you will need to take.

I can stress, however, the importance of getting the nursing administration to act on this. Your preceptor has noted what they are doing and can back you up. Talk to her and see if the two or you should do more. Start keeping a paper record of events and, if you feel comfortable enough, you might use a smartphone to secretly record what they're saying, only bringing it out if they try to deny what they're doing. Again, only do that if your preceptor agrees. She knows your hospital.

To me, it is quite clear what the hospital should do. The behavior of these staff not only grossly unprofessional, it is seriously endangering patients and putting the hospital at risk for a malpractice suit. Were I a nursing administrator, those involved were be called in, one by one, and told that their behavior had to immediately change and if there was but a single incident more, they'd be fired "for cause." I'm no great fan of most 'zero tolerance' policies, but in this case it is justified.

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To better understand how these stresses are affecting you, you might want to read this just-published article about some cutting-edge research:

Fear in the Cockpit: The Differences Between the Plane Crash in Taipei and the Miracle on the Hudson

Nature has you jumping into a 'bear about to eat me' mode that drastically reduces your ability to handle complex nursing problems. Until these circumstances change, you've got to beat back that "I'm under attack" response to the level of mere irritation. And yes, I know that won't be easy, but I hope realizing that's what is happening will help.

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I'm also almost done with a book, Senior Nurse Mentor, that I hope will offer a practical solution to problems like these. You can find a rough draft of it here. When it is published (almost everywhere) the digital version will be free.

Senior Nurse Mentor - Wattpad

And you can find the chapter where I deal with the brain-addling effect of stress here:

Senior Nurse Mentor - Loyalty and Focus - Page 1 - Wattpad

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Again, I am sorry that I cannot do more for you. But I hope I have helped by stressing that there is danger in what is happening, that it is not your fault, but that you must act quickly. Your responses to this stress are quite normal, but they're not the sorts of stresses that a hospital should permit any nurse to undergo. You not only have a right to a helpful, supportive work environment, any hospital that isn't providing that is courting disaster.

Feel free to pass on anything I've said on to your superiors, if you think they will find it helpful.

--Michael W. Perry

Gooselady, BSN, RN · Apr 10, 2015

RUN

You don't deserve this, and it's really not your problem . . . nor should you 'make it' your problem by gritting your teeth and enduring in hopes it will magically somehow get better.

If it is this bad this early on, you know it's not specific to you, right? It's not common, but there are truly bad places to work.

No reason to be a hero, hon. You don't owe this unit or that manager anything, except perhaps an explanation of why you ain't sticking around. If you are already in tears . . . that means something.

I've been in nursing almost 24 years, and in all those years there's been about two places that were just plain toxic from the git go, but I stuck it out, thinking it was something about me personally, or that it would magically get better. If I could give my 'self' advice from my current perspective, I'd say life is too darn short for this BS. There may be some difficulty in getting certain preferable jobs, so if I were you, I'd start looking, because I wouldn't want to be one on one with that nurse either, even if she fell in love with me.

GuEsT78 · Apr 10, 2015

I agree with Gooselady that when the entire system is wrong, getting out is the only solution. In the situation I described above, I did that twice, once leaving the unit and once leaving the hospital, the latter with a letter explaining to the DON some of the reasons why I was quitting.

But it's important to make sure that's the real situation. One bad apple, even with followers, says little about the entire barrel, meaning a hospital. Make sure the latter can't fix the former before running. If you don't, some other unfortunate nurse will soon find herself in your shoes.

In my previous post, I described a situation that was similar to yours, but differed in one critical way. With but one exception, the nurses I was working with were marvelous: friendly, helpful and supportive. I loved working with them. That was so true that, when my second head nurse, the one on the teen unit, returned from leave and began to conduct a vicious and critical witch hunt of all nursing staff, I flat out refused to cooperate. I could tell I could win points from her by informing on the nurses I was working with. I determined that not one word of criticism would come from me. To this day, I remain proud of that.

Earlier, when I was working Hem-Onc, I thought these problems lay with those two day nurses whose nickname rhymes with 'witch.' Only when I saw the same pattern happen on the teen unit without any nurse participation did I realize that this was a top-down problem. The nursing administration had adopted an 'shape up or ship out' attitude, filled with unfair criticism and virtually no praise. Nurses decided to ship out. In a couple of of months after I left, some 20% quit, and I suspect many of those who remained only did so to protect sick children from the low staffing.

Until you've established that's the situation at your hospital, I'd suggest that you hang in there and trying to get something done about that one nurse. Like I said, one vile nurse doesn't in itself mean the unit's administration much less the hospital has gone bad.

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I also suspect that your ill-treatment has a reason, perhaps roughly the same reason that one nurse was working behind my back to malign me. She didn't dare to do so to my face. Just after she start, I saved her neck when she made a very bad blunderâ€”pumping air in a central line. A couple of weeks later, I accidentally discovered that she'd not filed an incident report on it. I suspect my knowledge of that was why she was out to get me.

Something similar may be happening in your case. It's far easier to get away with bad nursing care on nights than on days. Imagine a single nurse who is lazy and wants to give substandard care. Further imagine that she has had some success at getting followers on night shift. A geriatric/psychiatric unit would be ideal for that. After all, the excuse could be made, "these people are all crazy or senile." Who will believe them, particularly when the documentation can be fixed and staff cover for one another? Even more chilling, medications with a street value might be diverted from patients who need them.

I'm not saying that is happening. I am saying that provides a rationale for driving away new nurses who're unlikely to participate in whatever schemes are planned. Keep in mind that being nasty isn't easy. It takes effort. That nurse is almost certainly treating you badly to make you leave. She may also have a broader and far worse agenda.

I know that's not likely to be easy, but it could prevent a lot of grief and, perhaps even more important, you will learn the bureaucratic fighting skills that'll make the rest of your nursing skills easier. Faced with something similar in the future, you'll respond more confidentially.

The problem with running when clashes like these arise is that you have to keep running every time they come up. Choose when and where you fight carefully, but there are times when you need to stand your ground and fight back.

Nor should you have to stand alone. The senior nurse mentor position linked in my earlier posting is intended to offer every hospital nurse a tough and experienced fellow nurse with the power to fight whatever negatively impacts nursing morale. That will be her primary job and for that she'll have only one boss, the hospital CEO.

As I mention in the book, the various branches of the U.S. military created similar positions in the 1990s to deal with morale in an all-voluntary military. Nursing needs to learn from what they've done. If you want good nursing morale, you need someone for which that is Job One.

jadelpn, LPN, EMT-B · Apr 10, 2015

I am so sorry this is happening to you. Do not let them make you cry. Management needs to do something about this. Immediately.

If they can not act professional, how do they treat the patients? ESPECIALLY as vulnerable as geri/psych. And seemingly, the nurses and CNA's who are the worst offenders in an effort to get you out of there....what exactly are THEY hiding that they are doing or not doing off shift? I would hate to even think it.

Your expectation is to be treated with dignity, and that you are part of the team when you need assistance. The first time this did not happen would be my last shift. And I would be clear with the manager about it. I would LOVE to see their faces if said manager decides to start popping in now and again at 2am, just to see for himself what is happening on off shifts. What that does is invoke fear in the hearts of those not doing their jobs--and can enact some change....

KatieMI, BSN, MSN, RN · Apr 11, 2015

InklingBooks,

the OP quite clearly mentioned that the unit divided among racial lines.

I, unfortunately, had a chance to get feeling of racism in nursing. And I am absolutely sure that, if evil big like this exists in that particular unit, then there is nothing to be "fixed". Even if there is really only one person doing that, everybody else knows, and silently approves her actions. These people know very well that they are all doing, and participating into, something which in the year of 2015 should not exist in the United States of America anywhere beyond history textbooks. There is nothing to fix, or teach any of them. No sane and decent person should spend a second figuring out what one of their "goals" might be, or if there is only one or more of them there. Confronting a shooter with bare hands would make more sense, IMHO ( and running to safety and taking those too weak or scared with you will make more sense still).

People like you and the OP described are the shooters using words instead of bullets, and they enjoy others' agony just as much. Only one thing the OP should do besides leaving that place immediately before she got involved in some action (or lack thereof) with bad outcome is to let everybody know where it all took place. Not only other nurses should be warned about toxic envoroinment, but also locals better know where not to seek help for their demented but still beloved ones.

SmilingBluEyes · Apr 13, 2015

THIS makes me cry. I am so sorry. THIS IS bullying IMO. And it's intolerable. You have the right to better treatment, for sure.

I don't know if you lack confidence (NOT blaming the victim, I promise)...hear me out.

Try different body language. I used to walk with my head down, shoulders hunched. I kept my opinions to myself. I was anxious every shift at my new job.

Then I decided to change a few things. I began to walk with my head back, shoulders back and straight. I asked how I could help (I had these two nurses who were horrid to me-------used to set me up to fail and look stupid all the time to the doctors).

I finally had enough. Diarrhea and nausea before work was getting to me. I finally told them, if they wanted help when the chips were down, I needed to learn. And I worked harder than the two of them put together. I did every menial task and helped them with their work whenever possible.

I asked questions when I did not know an answer and developed a self-deprecating sense of humor. I could poke fun at myself with out putting myself down. I saw the humor in every situation possible and laughed even when I felt like screaming.

It worked. Eventually, they chilled out and accepted me. Were we ever best friends? NO, but we got along and had mutual respect. I respected their knowledge and asked their opinions often.

Some work environments are toxic and the culture is negative. You are not going to change that. You CAN change, however how you react and behave. Make the best of it. If it's still all wrong and they never quit, it may be time for you to move on. BUT when/if you do, make sure you have an exit interview with HR and tell them EXACTLY what made you leave.

My heart goes out to you. I am so sorry. Try some of my suggestions, try not to take yourself too seriously and if all that fails, move on. HUGS