Nurse on nurse bullying, sadly, is nothing new. In the mid 80's the phrase with which many of us are acquainted "nurses eat their young" was coined by a professor of nursing. Research into the subject has been undertaken in the USA since the early 1990s with a rash of research appearing in the early to mid 2000s. The research confirms that this is a chronic problem in the Nursing profession. Whether it is viewed as a rite of passage or as something that nurses do to "vent" their own frustrations at the system appears to be at issue.
The current research grew from my witnessing nurse on nurse bullying following a return to work 6 weeks to the day from the date of surgery by a nurse after she had undergone major cancer surgery. The verbal ferocity of the attack, the fact that it was supervisor on an administrator, and of the fact that no one who witnessed it or who heard about it thereafter called out the perpetrator on her actions. The response by team members and the senior administrator was actually worse: "oh...that's the way she is. She's been that way for years. She does that to everyone." Clearly, that is not the correct response.
When this incident was recounted to other nurses from a variety of work environments, it was met with knowing shrugs. Nurses started to tell me their personal stories and stories of bullying they had witnessed from the time they were students. As a nurse educator, i decided to write a survey and to engage in some systematic research. I have created a survey of nurse on nurse bullying on Survey Monkey that will take 2 minutes and 23 seconds to answer. Your responses will help me to gather real information that can be quantified and measured, written up in an article and disseminated throughout the profession to enable us to get a grip on this problem. Here's the link to the survey. Stay tuned for the results. nurse on nurse bullying Survey
