Nurses, are you a victim of lateral violence? If so, you are not alone. Take the survey below to find out your score. If your results confirm you ARE a victim, continue reading for 4 different approaches you can take to begin putting an end to bullying.
Table of Contents
Please select the answer that is the CLOSEST to your experiences.
Scoring your Results
Each choice has the following point value: Always = 2; Sometimes= 1; and Never = 0. Add up the values for each column, and record the total for each column at the bottom of the survey.
If your score is greater than zero, then you are being bullied at work!
1. The good news is that you can do something about it!
Start by confronting those who verbally abuse you, and be proactive IMMEDIATELY after the verbal abuse. Tell the abuser that you will not tolerate unprofessional, disrespectful communication from any colleague, and that you want to settle the issue for the sake of patient safety and workplace morale. Keep a record of these episodes at home, and schedule a meeting with your nurse manager if they persist.
2. Identify other colleagues who are bullied, and observe their responses to the nurse bullies.
Approach these colleagues to offer your support and understanding of their experiences. Since there is strength in numbers, find out if any of the other bullied nurses want to practice assertive, respectful scripted responses that states none of you will tolerate any more unprofessional, disrespectful communication from them.
Through communications outside of work, develop some solutions to the problem together, such as working different shifts than the nurse bullies do. Keep a journal of these episodes at home, and record your attempts to negotiate with each bully. Encourage other bullied colleagues to do the same thing.
If your individual proactive communications are not successful with the bullies, talk with your bullied colleagues about meeting with your nurse manager for support and help with getting things worked out. You can meet your nurse manager as a group, individually, or both. Sometimes managers will respond to bullying in the workplace more quickly if the manager knows that more than one nurse is experiencing bullying.
3. If nothing changes in the workplace, offer to do an in-service for the workplace.
While many nurses experience bullying at work, most of them don’t have much knowledge about nurse bullying. Develop a 30-minute in-service about nurse bullying, either with your bullied colleagues or on your own. Ask your nurse manager to help you schedule a time for the in-service.
This demonstrates to your manager that you have used personal time to develop an educational intervention about nurse bullying, which indicates to him or to her that you are serious about solving the problem. Give yourself plenty of time to practice presenting the in-service so you will be confident and familiar with the material when you present it, and won’t be intimidated by questions from other colleagues.
4. You’ve done everything you can think of to stop the bullying, but it continues.
In this situation, your best solution may be to find another job. It is a sad fact that bullying is embedded into the nursing profession, and is found in every workplace. Failure happens even when we’ve done everything possible with strict adherence to the organization’s policies and procedures, and put forth 110% of our best effort.If you have to leave a nursing position because of bullying, please don’t think of it as a ‘failure’ because it isn’t.
There are times when nurses have to find a way to remove toxic stimuli from a patient’s environment to provide the patient with a safe environment that facilitates healing. In the case of bullying, YOU are the ‘patient’, the nurse bullies are the toxic stimuli, and the only way to remove the toxic stimuli for yourself is to change jobs. You have endured bullying, survived it, and learned from it. And you can help scores of other nurses who are enduring bullying in the workplace with every shift by sharing what you’ve learned in every nursing position you accept.