The Peculiarities of Conflict Handling
To make something different happen you need to implement a change. Whether planned or unplanned to achieve and establish goals, you need for first bring it fourth. In the nursing field, a change agent can be a leader or staff nurse who works in nursing. Change theories are used to bring planned/unplanned changes in nursing. Kurt Lewin, who is known to be the father of social psychology, uses three theory stages: moving, unfreezing and refreezing stage.
Unfreezing stage is an important stage to understand. Unfreezing is all about getting ready to change. It’s about getting to a point of understanding that change is needed within an environment and getting away from the comfort zone we are so use to. In the freeze stage, one begins to prep and get ready to implement something new. As a new we see this happening all the time in the hospital. A new change that’s being made at my job is nursing staff silencing telemetry alarms. Sometimes on the monitor an artifact could be showing which could set off an alarm, and it’s a natural instinct to silence it. But there was an incident where a patient was in distress and due to someone silencing the alarm, that patient was put in harm’s way. So, from now on if an alarm goes it, it will continue to ring until the patient’s heart rate goes back to sinus rhythm.
The second change is known as moving or transition stage. This stage isn’t an event but rather a process which is why it’s considered a transitional change. This is often the hardest stage for most individuals because people are fearful to get out of comfort zone and move towards something new. This change requires support, training and coaching to guide people. Going back to silencing telemetry alarms; a lot of staff had hard problems because they would be charting and couldn’t concentrate due to the noise. Instead of checking on the patient and making sure they were alright, staff would complain about shutting the noise out.
Stage three, freezing is sometimes referred to as refreezing. This stage is all about establishing stability once a change has been made. At this final stage, it’s been accepted and considered normal. Now at my job when an alarm goes off, someone goes into the patients’ room and sometimes the patient has taken their leads off their tele or has dis-connected themselves to go to the bathroom, or maybe sleeping wild. Once the problem has been solved the noise stops. Our staff quickly learned that this change was implemented to make sure the patient remains safe at all times and if there is an arrhythmia going on, us as nurses are able to catch it, asses the patient properly and treat appropriately.
Conflict happens when there is a disagreement resulting from individuals or group that differ in attitudes, beliefs, values or needs (Porter-O’Grady, T, 2016). Organizational conflict can occur due to tight budgets, staffing issues, management, and disagreements among staff member. Other type of conflict is interpersonal, which basically means a disagreement amongst individuals (Porter-O’Grady, T 2016). There are five steps in managing a conflict: analyze the conflict, determine management strategy, pre-negotiation, negotiation and post-negotiation. No matter what job you do, there will always be some form of conflict. The most important thing to do is to analyze point of views from both sides and find a conclusion to come to.
As stated previously, a change agent implements plans to achieve a new and better goal. As a change agent you need to be able to identify problems and resolve the issue. As nurses we constantly play a role as a change agent whether it comes to our patient’s safety or medication administration. We as nurses have to know that there will always be some form of conflict, but we must remember to handle the conflicts properly and resolve all issues thoroughly.