Bullying and Harassment in the Healthcare Workplace

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Table of Contents

Introduction
Origin of Bullying
Types of Bullying
Defamation
Recommendations
Conclusion
References

Introduction

Discrimination and abuse are harmful to both patients and physicians. Discrimination and abuse have far-reaching consequences; there are detrimental effects on patient care and safety. In contrast, a student who is intimidated by a senior colleague is more likely to prevent requesting aid or explanation from them perspective, thereby jeopardizing patient safety. Work engagement is reliant on a pleasant work environment where employees feel appreciated and respected. Trainee physicians who are harassed are less satisfied with their assignments overall. This paper is written to explore the origins of discrimination and harassment in the healthcare workplace.

Origin of Bullying

Bullying begins early in medical college and residencies; it has been referred to as an element of the learning activity: unstructured learning that occurs outside of the traditional medical program and occurs through undefinable procedures. Many students are aggressively challenged in these informal contexts, embarrassed for their lack of knowledge, disregarded, belittled, and ridiculed. However, because sufferers are made to feel responsible and helpless, these acts are difficult to establish and hard to enforce.

Bullying may be defined as a boss who is never satisfied with an employee’s performance, speculating or disseminating stories, purposely omitting a worker from staff meetings, and being summoned to unannounced meetings with the management where the person is denigrated. An environment that tolerates bullying, inadequate personnel levels, high workloads, power differentials, and poor management abilities contributes to the contamination. Role ambiguity and uncertainty, job overload, stress, a lack of autonomy, and a lack of administrative justice are particular organizational characteristics that can contribute to workplace harassment.

Bullying raises the likelihood of psychological discomfort and mental health issues among doctors. Female doctors who have been sexually harassed claim that it has harmed their trust in themselves as experts and has harmed their careers. Bullying and harassment have considerable costs for enterprises, primarily due to increased turnover and sick leave (León-Pérez et al., 2021). Lower productivity, potential lawsuit and compensation expenses, loss of providing benefits, and reputation damage must all be addressed. There is a growing acknowledgment of the significance of corporate culture in fostering and allowing bullying, which illustrates why certain companies have greater levels of harassment than others. Bullying is usually intentional, has a negative impact on the victim, and is used to exert control over staff (León-Pérez et al., 2021). Bullying is defined as hostile, purposeful, and regular conduct. Bullies typically target workers who lack proper support or are unable to protect themselves against hostility. The target perceives bullying as an act of aggression, which is an essential element of harassment.

Authoritarian, destination leadership styles; inadequate job design; long working hours; and preclearance from reorganization or cultural factors, mainly when extreme and top-down, are among the elements recognized as likely to contribute to a bullying culture. The hierarchy has also been known to contribute to harassment in the medical community. Because of the industry’s hierarchical character and labor strain, the possibility of silent by standing’ — a lack of colleagues to speak up – increases, allowing bullying conduct to continue unabated.

Doctors, particularly new or inexperienced nurses, consider nurse-on-nurse harassment as a regular aspect of the profession, giving rise to the expression “nursing staff eat their young.” Bullying is prevalent in healthcare environments such as mental treatment centers, state hospitals, and critical care units. Bullying is more common in long-term care settings in the evenings and at night. Workers who are generally under general practitioners are the focus of bullying, as are female marital workers with less schooling and who have kids at home.

Types of Bullying

Behavior problems have a negative influence on organizational enthusiasm, production, and attendance, which leads to quick and increasing turnover, which jeopardizes the safety of patients. Workplace bullying also results in litigation, disability benefits, lost earnings, a negative influence on the company’s reputation, and deterioration of the patient-healthcare professional connection (Adams & Bryan, 2021). Workers, patients, and relatives who observe non-citizen conduct are concerned about the effect on care—for instance, a nurse who publicly criticizes another nurse or a doctor who openly criticizes a nurse. Given the harmful effects of workplace harassment on workers’ psychological health and well-being, and thus on the productivity of any business, it is critical to understand the factors that contribute to the origin and growth of this social phenomenon (Adams & Bryan, 2021). In this regard, the psychologists who are now spearheading this study method have primarily concentrated on victimization and bullying psychopathology.

Understanding the phenomena of bullying requires a view of any business as a complete entity; it appears difficult to envisage a labor setting as overly autonomous or non-influential enough to prohibit internal workplace violence. As a result, whereas early research mainly concentrated on the mental qualities of bullying and its targets, numerous groups have addressed a more serious look at the impact of organizational work and institutional contexts on individuals.

The amount of labor stability may influence the measure of susceptibility to bully, not only because relatively low expert places of employment typically hold insecure and transitory occupations but also because uncertainty diminishes workers’ perceived authority over their supervisors. Indeed, one of the explanations cited to look at the rise in harassment in twenty-first-century firms is that organizational transformation procedures and high degrees of outsourced have widened the power imbalance between management and workers.

Elevated concentrations of regulation, rigorous rules, and overly high job stability may create situations conducive to bullying, as these conditions render abusers invisible and sufferers less inclined to leave. Workers in the formal sector have unique employment conditions; they are safeguarded by civil servant legislation and requirements, organizations with internal conciliation and arbitration, and provisions that protect against reprisal for whistleblowers.

Aside from the negative impact, this conduct has on sufferers and their patients. It can also result in high costs and hassles for employers. Often, the manager is thoroughly ignorant that the source of their problems is the fundamental phenomenon of workplace harassment. Increases in attrition, unavailability, and the expense of finding new workers, as well as a higher likelihood of civil action, can all have an impact on a firm.

Defamation

This is considered defamatory when someone makes false claims about another individual to a third party. In most cases, a defamation lawsuit must also show that the misleading statements harmed the target’s reputation in some way. However, no evidence of actual reputational injury is necessary for some circumstances when the comment is connected to the person’s occupation and has the potential to influence their employment. The damage is merely assumed because these words can affect whether an individual is recruited, advanced, penalized, or dismissed, as well as how they interact with colleagues and superiors.

Companies should also use discretion when disclosing information about a previous employer to a potential new employer. Making remarks about an organization’s productivity or personality should be fact-based and very well, and being able to express personal views should be avoided entirely. Receiving a certified sworn affidavit from the former colleague allowing the dissemination of information to third-party companies is another way to safeguard oneself. The best protection against a defamation suit is to make sure that all comments made about a colleague, subjugated, or superintendent are accurate and verifiable, assuming these declarations need to be created at all.

Recommendations

Every corporation should send a clear message that bullying is not accepted in any way and is considered serious misconduct under the conduct code. Creating a project atmosphere where all employees are treated with dignity and respect and feel appreciated is critical to preventing bullying behaviors (Lever et al., 2019). To foster respectful interactions, it is essential to establish a policy that supports dignity at work, as well as a learning and development program. Proactive measures like values-based recruiting, effective and timely assessments, fairness and transparency implementation of absence management or flexible working policies, and voicing concerns policies may all help to avoid incidents from occurring. Work-related stress avoidance and management are critical to creating decent working conditions.

Hospital management is advised to have regular interactions with any clinician who expresses concern about workplace bullying (WPB). A communication process that is open and honest might help in isolating such regrettable occurrences, exposing culprits, and safeguarding other employees. The fight against workplace bullying involves joint efforts by hospital managers and researchers to identify other WPB-predisposing variables that are typically under-reported in institutions (Lever et al., 2019). These include evaluating bullies’ early life, psychological well-being, financial stresses, alcohol misuse, emotional honesty, and trauma background.

Most health providers are concerned about WPB, particularly its detrimental influence on patient safety and quality of care. Worrying about WPB demonstrated that medical professionals were ardent champions and safety guards for their clients. WPB not only causes personal stress for practitioners but also jeopardizes patient interaction. WPB concerned an enormous number of professionals with higher levels of education and those with less work experience. Prior experience with a WPB incidence increases the practitioner’s concern, whereas training on dealing with bullying situations reduces the practitioner’s problem.

Identifying and understanding variables that underlie workplace bullying is critical in developing more effective preventative and intervention techniques to address this societal problem. Workplace harassment in hospital environments happens four times more frequently than in all other small corporations combined, with mental wards, hospital emergency rooms, and elevated units having the most excellent rates. Bullying incidence varies significantly between countries and even within the same nation. Physical bullying can have a significant harmful influence on patients, which is of great concern for healthcare practitioners (Munro & Phillips, 2020). This might be related to how harassment is thought to lead employees to feel discouraged, dedication to their company, and the capacity to focus on employment, all of which place the worker at increased risk of making errors on the job.

Fear of retribution, social stigma, or harm to one’s career development opportunities may result in the underrepresentation of offenses. As a result, many managers may be utterly ignorant that they have a discipline problem inside their organization. The risk that a company will reject a civil action claim merely based on traditional bullying is significantly small. Nevertheless, the expense of opposing these claims might be too expensive. Furthermore, attrition, the ensuing need to employ more staff, rises in absences, and perhaps a rise in overtime compensation to workers who must make up the shortfall all amount to clearly avoidable monetary blows. As a result, from a cost standpoint, incorporating a system-wide curriculum to combat aggressive behaviors is prone to make more understanding.

Legally and morally, cost avoidance should not be the primary motive for developing comprehensive anti-bullying policies or codes of behavior. The individual’s well-documented health consequences should be the reason for alarm. Given that other medical institutions have previously acted in this area, the emergency medicine community may have slipped behind the times. Furthermore, businesses should take proactive measures to design educational programs and foster an environment that reduces the fear of reporting incivility (Munro & Phillips, 2020). As previously stated, comparable methods have benefited other sectors.

Conclusion

To summarize, bullying increases the chance of depression and other mental health problems among doctors. Racism and violence are detrimental to both patients and doctors. Discrimination and maltreatment have far-reaching ramifications; they jeopardize patient care and safety. Organizational climate is dependent on a pleasant working environment in which workers create a positive environment. Bullying, insufficient personnel numbers, heavy workloads, power imbalances, and poor management abilities all lead to degradation.

Organizational factors such as role uncertainty and ambiguity, task overloading, stress, a lack of control, and weak administrative justice can all promote harassment in the workplace. Female physicians who have been sexually harassed feel that it has impacted their confidence in themselves as professionals as well as in their jobs. Discrimination and abuse have high costs for businesses owing to higher turnover and sick leave. There is a growing recognition of the importance of company culture in developing and permitting abuse, which explains why certain firms have higher levels of harassment than others.

Harassment is described as aggressive, deliberate, and consistent behavior. Bullies generally target employees who lack enough assistance or who are unable to defend themselves against hostility. Clinicians, new or revolutionary or naïve doctors, see nurse-on-nurse assault as a common occurrence in the industry, giving birth to the phrase “nursing staff eats their young.” Bullying is common in healthcare settings such as psychiatric hospitals, state hospitals, and intensive care units. Harassment is more widespread in long-term healthcare institutions late at night and in the evenings. Bullying targets employees who are typically under the care of general practitioners, as well as female spousal workers with less education and children at home.

Recognizing the phenomenon of bullying necessitates viewing any firm as a whole; it seems impossible to believe a labor environment is sufficiently independent or uninfluential to preclude internal occupational injuries. As a result, although the early study focused mainly on the mental characteristics of bullies and their targets, various organizations have given a more thorough look at the influence of organizational functioning and institutional environments on individuals. The level of employment instability may impact the measurement of sensitivity to bullying, not only because relatively low expert workplaces generally hold unstable and transient vocations but also because uncertainty reduces workers’ perceived power over their superiors.

Elevated levels of control, strict standards, and excessive job stability may produce environments favorable to bullying, as these characteristics make abusers invisible and victims less likely to leave. Aside from the detrimental impact this behavior has on patients and suffering. It can also result in significant expenditures and complications for companies. Frequently, the manager is completely unaware that the root cause of their troubles is the fundamental phenomenon of workplace discrimination. Increased turnover, unavailability, and the cost of hiring new employees, as well as an increased possibility of a legal lawsuit, can all have an effect on a business.

In most situations, a defamation action must also demonstrate that the false remarks affected the target’s image. However, where the statement is related to the person’s vocation and has the potential to influence their job, no evidence of actual reputational loss is required. Businesses should also use caution when revealing information about a prior employer to a possible new employer. Making comments on an organization’s success or character should be fact-based and well-reasoned, and expressing personal opinions should be avoided altogether. Another option to protect oneself is to obtain a certified sworn document from a former colleague authorizing the disclosure of information to third-party firms.

Bullying is not tolerated in any form and is deemed significant misbehavior under the conduct code; thus, every organization should send a clear message. To minimize bullying behaviors, it is vital to create a project environment in which all employees are treated with decency and respect and feel valued. Proactive approaches like values-based hiring, accurate and practical evaluations, accountability and integrity in absence management or flexible work rules, and speaking concerns policies may all assist in preventing occurrences. Avoiding and managing work-related stress is crucial to developing good working conditions.

It is recommended that hospital administration meets with any doctor who raises worry about WPB on a frequent basis. The battle against workplace harassment entails collaborative efforts by hospital management and academics to uncover other WPB risk factors that are generally under-reported in facilities. The majority of healthcare providers are worried about WPB, notably its negative impact on patient safety and quality of care. Worrying about WPB revealed that medical professionals were devoted supporters and protectors of their patients. WPB not only creates emotional stress in clinicians but also completely undermines the patient relationship. WPB affected a large number of skilled workers, both those with advanced degrees and those with less job experience.

Bullying prevalence varies significantly between nations and even within the same country. Physical bullying may have a considerable negative impact on patients, which is a significant worry for healthcare providers. Fear of retaliation, social shame, or harm to one’s professional advancement chances may cause transgressions to be underreported. As a result, many managers may be completely unaware that their firm has a disciplinary problem. The likelihood of a firm rejecting a civil action suit based only on classic bullying is relatively low. Nonetheless, the cost of disputing these claims may be too high.

As a consequence, from a financial aspect, adopting a system-wide program to prevent violent behaviors is likely to make more sense. The primary motivation for adopting comprehensive anti-bullying rules or codes of conduct should not be cost avoidance. The individual’s well-documented health repercussions should cause concern. Given that other medical organizations have already engaged in this area, it is possible that the accident and emergency community has fallen behind the times. Additionally, organizations should take proactive steps to provide instructional programs and promote a climate that eliminates the fear of reporting incivility.

References

Adams, L., & Bryan, V. (2021). Workplace harassment: The leadership factor. In Healthcare Management Forum, 34(2). Sage CA: Los Angeles, CA: SAGE Publications. Web.

León-Pérez, J. M., Escartín, J., & Giorgi, G. (2021). The presence of workplace bullying and harassment worldwide.Concepts, Approaches and Methods, 1, 55-86. Web.

Lever, I., Dyball, D., Greenberg, N., & Stevelink, S. A. (2019). Health consequences of bullying in the healthcare workplace: A systematic review. Journal of Advanced Nursing, 75(12), 3195-3209. 3195–3209. Web.

Munro, C. E., & Phillips, A. W. (2020). Bullying in the workplace. Surgery (Oxford), 38(10), 653-658.

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