Bullying - What is it?

[RNdynamic]

A lot of threads discuss whether or not bullying is rampant. I want to give some examples of behaviors and I am interested in people to tell me which one(s) consist of bullying, rude behavior, or social abuse.

(1) A nurse grabbing a sheet from her orientee's hands, stating in a raised voice that "its too sloppy, give it to me" so that she can fold it herself over a patient.

(2) A nurse not letting her orientee go to lunch or cover their orientee's lunch because the orientee had to catch up on documentation, even though the nurse had taken lunch herself.

(3) A nurse loudly commanding their orientee in the nurses station to finish their documentation before doing anything else because they don't want to get out late.

(4) A nurse asking another nurse "why did you needlestick yourself?" after an accidental needlestick that requires the nurse to go to occ health.

(5) A nurse asking another nurse during ICU handoff why they didn't obtain an order to replete their patients potassium of 3.8.

These are real life situations that I have experienced or observed. In my opinion, the majority of them demonstrate the height of rudeness. The last one demonstrates someone suggesting that a nurse didn't follow their patient's labs to replete their normal potassium level to one that was more normal.

[That Guy, BSN, RN, EMT-B]

How do people survive in this day and age?

[RNdynamic]

No one is defending it. We're just saying the examples you used don't rise to the level of bullying. I'd consider them things you'd hear a brusque, impatient person say.

What business does that person have being a preceptor?

[RNdynamic]

Who says the orientee will have time to do the documentation after lunch? Things could come up when she gets back from lunch that would further delay her getting the charting finished. The longer the documentation is delayed, the less likely it is to be accurate. Unless the orientee is a diabetic, it's highly unlikely that having a late lunch is going to cause a medical crisis. It may very well teach her to sharpen her time-mgmt skills. There's no reason to do so if she knows that someone will always take care of her problems for her. Mistakes are made when documentation is late/missing. The nurse covering her lunch would be out of the loop without that information.

I don't know about you, but I don't feel as productive when I am hungry as when I have eaten. I suggest looking up hunger as a motivational state to learn more. People aren't productive when they don't eat. Eating promotes a higher energy level and more alert thinking than someone who has not eaten. Who feels energized after not eating for 12 hours? Probably no animal or human does.

The fact that things may come up after the lunch that would further delay the charting serves only to reinforce the fact that the lunch should come earlier, not later. Also, my example demonstrates *no lunch at all.* Not a late lunch. Out of respect for the OP, please refrain from editorializing my examples.

[OCNRN63, RN]

What business does that person have being a preceptor?

Some places don't give staff a choice in the matter.

[OCNRN63, RN]

I don't know about you, but I don't feel as productive when I am hungry as when I have eaten. I suggest looking up hunger as a motivational state to learn more. People aren't productive when they don't eat. Eating promotes a higher energy level and more alert thinking than someone who has not eaten. Who feels energized after not eating for 12 hours? Probably no animal or human does.

The fact that things may come up after the lunch that would further delay the charting serves only to reinforce the fact that the lunch should come earlier, not later. Also, my example demonstrates *no lunch at all.* Not a late lunch. Out of respect for the OP, please refrain from editorializing my examples.

Yes ma'am. It's not like this site allows for input from all members.

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[scottaprn]

OCRN63

So you have no interest in evidence based practice. fair enough.

[scottaprn]

Wooh

Read the data. there is tons of other research on other professions with regards to workplace bullying. It is studied extensively in other fields.

Did you know there are 26 states that have had workplace bullying laws introduced to state legislatures. Surely you are not so naive that you tgink this is happening because of nursing alone.

The data is very clear that the rate of bullying in nursing is far higher than the average profession.

Again read the literature instead of making up excuses that support your preconceived and uninformed responses.

[calivianya, BSN, RN]

Regarding #2, I had the opposite problem with lunch while I was an orientee... my preceptor would encourage me to go eat, I'd tell her I wasn't finished with my charting, she'd say I could finish later, I'd go eat, and then she'd rip me a new one when I came back over documentation that wasn't finished. It happened just like that every single shift. I honestly started to dread taking a lunch and tried to find ways to weasel out of it until my charting was done, like hiding in a patient's room to do my charting so she couldn't make me leave without looking odd in front of the patient. She liked to take her lunch around 12/1, so that was when I started to get anxious about her making me go...

I wouldn't call it bullying, but it was certainly obnoxious behavior and it was hinting in the direction of a hostile work environment. I had expected to feel more insecure and scared when I got off orientation, but actually it was a breath of fresh air. I felt so free when I was finally off orientation and I could get things done at my own pace and take lunch when I chose. Even if behaviors like the above are not bullying, they definitely undermine a new nurse's self esteem and confidence, and make them unhappy. I heard a lot of my preceptor's orientees did not make it off orientation before they left the unit.

Maybe we should quit looking at this from the standpoint of whether or not it's bullying since that is such a controversial term in nursing. We should instead look at the effects of this kind of behavior on employee turnover. I think we can probably all agree that constantly having to orient new people because nobody stays isn't productive for anyone. It doesn't help the patients to have brand new nurses all of the time. It doesn't help the experienced nurses because they have to precept all of the time and get burned out when the second someone gets off orientation, they get a new orientee. Finally, it certainly doesn't help the new nurses, who now have a job that they only worked at for two months on their resume.

So, why are we still allowing behaviors that perpetuate this cycle to continue? I'm not saying coddle every new grad that walks through the door, but maybe efforts to be more personable would be more productive. The school of hard knocks might have worked back in the day when no one left a job no matter how bad, but now that people are more inclined to leave when something isn't working out, the school of hard knocks needs to be a thing of the past. It just costs the employers, experienced nurses, and patients too much.

[OCNRN63, RN]

OCRN63

So you have no interest in evidence based practice. fair enough.

Where did I say I was uninterested in evidence-based practice?

[RNdynamic]

Yes ma'am. It's not like this site allows for input from all members.

​

I welcome input. But it's dishonest to reimagine my example and present it as factually different than what I am saying is how it happened. It was not a late lunch, a deferred lunch. It was a total denial of lunch for the day.

[nurseprnRN, BSN, RN]

This is getting very repetitive. By actual count, you have here a lot of responses from long-term, mature, self-confident, very experienced nurses who, I would wager, might or might not have gotten their panties in a twist when these things happened to them when they were new grads on orientation. And now they have moved on.

I don't see these people as passive wimpies prone to rolling over for bullying and denying it exists. I see them as people who have learned that the world of work, especially work in stressful milieus, requires acquiring the ability to have a broader perspective and a thicker skin, and they have matured enough to do that. They have seen true bullying (being physically shoved, pinched, cars keyed, being sworn at in front of others, belongings vandalized, threatened with physical harm) and can tell the difference between rudeness, crassness, bad management ... and real bullying itself.

That's my advice...which I am dead-certain sure the OP will discount or ignore. Alas, the perpetual victimhood thang is soooo seductive. It's always so much easier to have somebody else responsible for your own unhappiness, isn't it?

[OCNRN63, RN]

This is getting very repetitive. By actual count, you have here a lot of responses from long-term, mature, self-confident, very experienced nurses who, I would wager, might or might not have gotten their panties in a twist when these things happened to them when they were new grads on orientation. And now they have moved on.

I don't see these people as passive wimpies prone to rolling over for bullying and denying it exists. I see them as people who have learned that the world of work, especially work in stressful milieus, requires acquiring the ability to have a broader perspective and a thicker skin, and they have matured enough to do that. They have seen true bullying (being physically shoved, pinched, cars keyed, being sworn at in front of others, belongings vandalized, threatened with physical harm) and can tell the difference between rudeness, crassness, bad management ... and real bullying itself.

That's my advice...which I am dead-certain sure the OP will discount or ignore. Alas, the perpetual victimhood thang is soooo seductive. It's always so much easier to have somebody else responsible for your own unhappiness, isn't it?

The ED where I worked had a physician who was notorious for screaming at nursing staff, even getting physical. Nothing was done until she threw a used syringe at a nurse. The needle broke her skin, and to make matters worse, the patient was HIV+. This was in the early years of the AIDS crisis, when being HIV+ was usually a death sentence. When the nurse got an atty., the hospital finally let the doctor go.

Considering the harangue I'm getting for having misread the OP's comment about lunch, I'm sures/he will find persecution on the job at every turn.