Have you seen a decrease in verbal abuse by physicians?

Nurses General Nursing

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I know that one of JCAHO's new initiatives is to insist that health care facilities adopt a low-tolerance policy towards rude, demeaning, and verbally abusive physicians. From my perspective, they are still alive and well and stomping, hissing, and flapping their wings at the nurses. Have you seen any decrease in the willingness of physicians to go on the attack against nurses who dare to bother them about patient needs, hospital policies, necessity of nurses to stay within their scope of practice, etc.? Because I am getting too old for the putdowns.

Specializes in ER, PACU, Med-Surg, Hospice, LTC.

Even though our facility has a policy that a Nurse can "write-up" a Doctor for his/her abusive behavior, it doesn't make a bit of difference. The Hospital doesn't do anything with the reports. The "write-up" sounds good on paper and in theory, but does jack-all. And now, the Nurse who writes a report risks retaliation from that MD because the incident reports are not anonymous.

So, go ahead, report that Doc for being rude and abusive.....who is the person actually punished in the long run?

The Nurse.

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The Center for American Nurses recently performed a survey of over 800 nurses and found that surprisingly that NURSES were the most common cause of workplace hostility and violence. The other results of the survey were recently published in Nursing Mangement, May 2009.

You might want to check out the other resources that the Center has for lateral violence and bullying. There are excellent resources. http://www.centerforamericannurses.org

Good luck to those of you that are still seeing violence and hostility in the workplace. Nursing is hard enough without having to feel as if you have to put on armor just to come to work.

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Specializes in ER, PACU, Med-Surg, Hospice, LTC.
The Center for American Nurses recently performed a survey of over 800 nurses and found that surprisingly that NURSES were the most common cause of workplace hostility and violence.

I believe it!

The lack of team work, back stabbing and general hostility towards one another was such a shock for me when I first started Nursing. I guess I was somewhat sheltered from it during Nursing school and I honestly believed that Health Care Professionals worked as a team to help patients.

Boy was I in for a BIG surprise!

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Specializes in LTC, Med/Surg, Peds, ICU, Tele.
The Center for American Nurses recently performed a survey of over 800 nurses and found that surprisingly that NURSES were the most common cause of workplace hostility and violence. The other results of the survey were recently published in Nursing Mangement, May 2009.

You might want to check out the other resources that the Center has for lateral violence and bullying. There are excellent resources. http://www.centerforamericannurses.org

Good luck to those of you that are still seeing violence and hostility in the workplace. Nursing is hard enough without having to feel as if you have to put on armor just to come to work.

Did they adjust those statistics for the fact that nurses outnumber physicians?

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Did they adjust those statistics for the fact that nurses outnumber physicians?

You would have to look at the article to see what the methodology was. I can't speak to that specifically. I would love to read the article myself, but do not currently have access to do that. I heard the content presented at this year's LEAD Summit, where this information was presented. Interesting question.

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Nurses are much more verbally abusive toward doctors. They just don't hear it.

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I see that that the economy opened the eyes of many doctors since more experienced nurses (I dare to say the doc right hand) are getting fired and new graduates are being hired for lower wage.The doctors are realizing that they are loosing their worth of gold and are upset about the politics of hospitals.

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Specializes in LTC, Med/Surg, Peds, ICU, Tele.
I see that that the economy opened the eyes of many doctors since more experienced nurses (I dare to say the doc right hand) are getting fired and new graduates are being hired for lower wage.The doctors are realizing that they are loosing their worth of gold and are upset about the politics of hospitals.

Do you have evidence supporting your claim? I haven't heard about this trend.

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Yes I have a friend who is a doctor and works at a certain hospital and complain about this all the time.

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Specializes in LTC, Med/Surg, Peds, ICU, Tele.
Yes I have a friend who is a doctor and works at a certain hospital and complain about this all the time.

In other words, purely secondhand, anecdotal evidence.

Not very convincing...

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I'm not trying to convince anybody at all...this is what I heard.

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