Scott Hale - Fotolia.com
Theresa Brown, an oncology nurse, describes a situation in which an entire medical team on its morning rounds stands in a patient’s room, waiting for a test result. The patient, a friendly middle-aged guy, jokingly asked his doctor whom he should yell at. The doctor turned and pointed at the patients’ nurse and replied, “If you want to scream at anyone, scream at her.”
In this article on the New York Times’ Well blog, Brown notes that this bullying didn’t happen 30 years ago and it didn’t happen on a TV show like “House” — it happened to her, just a few months ago.
Brown later asked the doctor if she could quote him for the article, and he nonchalantly said “Sure, it’s a time-honored tradition — blame the nurse whenever anything goes wrong.”
While Brown was stunned and insulted, she also was concerned about the problems such attitudes pose to patient health. Nurses are the hospital’s front line, and such attitudes can create a hostile and even dangerous environment in a setting where “close cooperation can make the difference between life and death.” While many hospitals have anti-bullying policies, the seriousness of the issue is too rarely recognized.
While most doctors clearly respect their colleagues on the nursing staff, every nurse knows at least one, if not many, who don’t.
Indeed, every nurse has a story like mine, and most of us have several. A nurse I know, attempting to clarify an order, was told, “When you have ‘M.D.’ after your name, then you can talk to me.” A doctor dismissed another’s complaint by simply saying, “I’m important.”
When a doctor thoughtlessly dresses down a nurse in front of patients or their families, it’s not just a personal affront, it’s an incredible distraction, taking our minds away from our patients, focusing them instead on how powerless we are.
That said, the most damaging bullying is not flagrant and does not fit the stereotype of a surgeon having a tantrum in the operating room. It is passive, like not answering pages or phone calls, and tends toward the subtle: condescension rather than outright abuse, and aggressive or sarcastic remarks rather than straightforward insults.
And because doctors are at the top of the food chain, the bad behavior of even a few of them can set a corrosive tone for the whole organization. Nurses in turn bully other nurses, attending physicians bully doctors-in-training, and experienced nurses sometimes bully the newest doctors.
Such an uncomfortable workplace can have a chilling effect on communication among staff. A 2004 survey by the Institute for Safe Medication Practices found that workplace bullying posed a critical problem for patient safety: rather than bring their questions about medication orders to a difficult doctor, almost half the health care personnel surveyed said they would rather keep silent. Furthermore, 7 percent of the respondents said that in the past year they had been involved in a medication error in which intimidation was at least partly responsible.
The result, not surprisingly, is a rise in avoidable medical errors, the cause of perhaps 200,000 deaths a year.
Concerned about the role of bullying in medical errors, the Joint Commission, the primary accrediting body for American health care organizations, has warned of a distressing decline in trust among hospital employees and, with it, a decline in the quality of medical outcomes.
What can be done to counter hospital bullying? For one thing, hospitals should adopt standards of professional behavior and apply them uniformly, from the housekeepers to nurses to the president of the hospital. And nurses and other employees need to know they can report incidents confidentially.
Offending parties, whether doctors or nurses, would be required to undergo civility training, and particularly intransigent doctors might even have their hospital privileges — that is, their right to admit patients — revoked.
But to be truly effective, such change can’t be simply imposed bureaucratically. It has to start at the top. Because hospitals tend to be extremely hierarchical, even well-meaning doctors tend to respond much better to suggestions and criticisms from people they consider their equals or superiors. I’ve noticed that doctors otherwise prone to bullying will tend to become models of civility when other doctors are around.
In other words, alongside uniform, well-enforced rules, doctors themselves need to set a new tone in the hospital corridors, policing their colleagues and letting new doctors know what kind of behavior is expected of them.
This shouldn’t be hard: most doctors are kind, well-intentioned professionals, and I rarely have a problem talking openly with them. But unless we can change the overall tone of the workplace, doctors like the one who insulted me in front of my patient will continue to act with impunity.
I wish I could say otherwise, but after being publicly slapped down, I will think twice before speaking up around him again. Whether that was his intention, or whether he was just being thoughtlessly callous, it’s definitely not in my patients’ best interest.