Bullying/Lateral Violence in the Nursing Environment

Bullying is an important problem to discuss since it is present in many environments where people are supposed to work as a team, not excluding the groups of adults. According to this fact, it is important to know how to avoid such an issue and how to help others who suffer because of bullying at the workplace. This paper is dedicated to the issue of violence in the nursing environment and it discusses how this problem can be eliminated.

Bullying at the Workplace

Bullying at the workplace may take different forms from offensive words to physical harm. The offenders might range from the coworkers of the lower levels of position to bosses. The issues of violence in the working team should be addressed as soon as they are discovered. First, continual offending affects an individual’s well-being; the abused person may begin to have problems with his/her self-esteem and feel depressed. Moreover, bullying interferes with the quality of performance. The suffering employee may do his/her duties worse because of feeling unsafe and being focused on the feeling all the time. Apart from that, when the violence occurs, the group of people can no longer work as a team.

Literature on the Issue

First, it is important to mention the difference between bullying and lateral violence. Lateral violence is the incident that takes place only once among the individuals who have the same level of professional power and belong to the same culture. Bullying, on the other hand, may occur among the employees who have different positions and come from different countries. Apart from that, bullying is featured by repetitiveness. The acts of violence may repeat for the period of time of six month, for instance (Simons & Maw, 2012). According to the information provided by the Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety (2014), bullying at the workplace embraces the following actions: spreading rumors, isolating a person socially, interfering with someone completing their professional tasks, doing physical harm or threatening to do that, providing the wrong information on purpose, spying, and making offensive jokes. Among the factors that may serve as the reasons for bullying are the desire to get promotion or better equipment, recruitment, individual characteristic features, and various private life and physiological problems (Etienne, 2014).

Ways to Eliminate the Issue

According to Allen, Holland, and Reynolds (2014), it is necessary that the individuals leading the health care establishment make all the employees aware of the fact that bullying and lateral violence are not tolerated. They must outline the precise consequences of the violence at the workplace and apply the penalty every time misconduct takes place.

The discussed issue cannot be eliminated in the cases where the victim and witnesses remain silent. To solve the problem, the management staff should be addressed. In the cases where managers ignore the situation or even contribute to it, the higher authorities can be turned to. Professional nursing organizations and state nurses’ association belong to them. In severe cases, lawyers must be involved to support the victim. In such situations, it is important to note when and where the incident took place as well as to have witnesses or evidence (Gaffney, Demarco, Hofmeyer, Vessey, & Budin, 2012)

Professional Implications

The information cited from the scholarly literature on the issue of bullying and lateral violence is useful both for the managers of health care establishments and for nurses. Thus, managers should take into consideration what is defined as bullying and lateral violence and the examples of such behavior in order to be able to recognize and to solve the problem in time. Consequently, nurses must know what should be done when a nurse becomes a victim of the workplace violence or witnesses someone else being offended.

Conclusion

To conclude with, the issue of bullying in the nursing environment is an important one and it calls for the immediate addressing because it interferes with the both personal well-being and professional performance. In the cases when violence occurs, it is important to report the problem to the management staff or to the organizations that protect nurses’ rights. It is also important that the authorities of health care establishments set out the rules that forbid bullying and make the workers aware of the penalty they will carry if they offend their coworkers.

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