Question

Chapter 25 – Workplace Issues

Complete the following Critical Thinking Exercises.

1.   Define lateral violence?    How does it differ from bullying?

2.   Describe an incident where you witness lateral violence or bullying in the workplace or the clinical setting.     Could the situation have been avoided?   If yes please explain.

3.   Zerwekh discussed the fact that workers are unprepared to deal with a bully in the work place. However, there are steps that can be followed if you are the target of a bully. List the steps and explain how each step will help you deal with bullying.

4.   In order to continuously provide quality patient care nurses must work in a safe environment.

List the actions as discussed in your book that will ensure a safe work environment in health care facilities.

5.        Discuss the pros and cons of mandatory overtime and floating assignments

Answer 1

Lateral violence

Lateral violence in nursing is the verbal or nonverbal aggressive behaviour to a nurse by another nurse.

Lateral violence also known as horizontal violence. The common types of lateral violence in the work place are back stabbing, verbal abuse, breaking the trust, hiding necessary informations etc. Whereas the bullying refers to An act of intimidating a weeker person to do something especially such repeated coercion. Bullying is the persistent acts intended to make life unpleasant for another person. Examples for work place bullying are physical abuse, yelling, gossiping, punishment for no wrong doing

2. Example for work place bullying/ lateral violence: Incident

An icident of blocking the leave application of Ms. A by the head nurse happened and it repeated several times . Finally when the time of increment the headnurse written a negative report about Ms. A and the increment process got blocked that affected the promotion of Ms. A.

The situation could avoid by Ms. A , If she was reporting to the Nurse manager or the Human resource department at first itself. The failure to report the blocking of leave application several time, lead the head nurse to repeat the same bullying behaviour during increment and promotion time.

3. Steps to deal with bullying

If a person feels that he is a target of bully, He has to:

a) show assertiveness ( directly tell the bully that the behaviour is not acceptable, will be reported to the higher authority , if it is repeated)

b) Keep a record on each incident of bullying with all details such as date, time, incident, and if any document of email, memos are available keep it safely as a proof of the bullying. In case of Verbal bullying, record the witness name also, if it is there.

c) Report the incident to the manager or HR or Supervisor

d) Never revenge to a person who bullies you instead report it.

4) Actions to ensure safe working environment in Health care organizations:

* Develop a safe working environment by employer and develop a safe working environment policy. or safety plan

* Train the staff members regarding the safety working environment and the employee benefits, hazards prevention etc.

* Let the HR department take care of employee satisfaction and prevent unnecessary loading of a particular person

* Encourage a reporting system to report the each important incidents to the respective heads.

* Conduct seminars on work place bullying and lateral violence, ways to prevent and manage it.