Cultivating Healthful Environments by addressing Incivility

Cultivating Healthful Environments by addressing Incivility
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Cultivating Healthful Environments by addressing Incivility
Incivility is a serious issue that has affected nursing as a profession. It is present in both nursing education and practice. Incivility refers to negative behavior, such as yelling or abuse of power, which is perpetrated by and/or targeted to a nurse (Layne, Anderson, & Henderson, 2019). Further, while incivility and workplace bullying can be considered similar, there is a slight difference in that unlike bullying, incivility may occur just once and may lack deliberation. Due to the negativity that rises from incivility, recipients of such acts of aggression often feel humiliated or threatened at the workplace, creating a very unhealthy work environment for the victims.
Addressing the issue of incivility in nursing practice is of great importance because it affects nurses’ well-being and their ability to deliver quality care. At the individual level, incivility causes poor mental health among nurses (Phillips, Stalter, Winegardner, Wiggs, & Jauch, 2018). As individual nurses experience negative behavior from others, they may develop anxiety and depression. Being the victim of incivility can increase the stress levels of individual nurses, thus affecting their psychological well-being. Also, it affects professional relationships, especially when the perpetrator is a fellow nurse (De Villers & Cohn, 2017). Further, incivility decreases productivity among victims. At the microsystem level, incivility increases the prevalence of unsafe practices among nurses. According to Warrner, Sommers, Zappa, and Thornlow (2016), when incivility becomes rampant in healthcare organizations, nurses tend to employ unsafe practices, such as going through with unclear orders because they are afraid to seek clarification from those who issued the orders. Also, nurses tend to go through with orders without challenging them even though they do not serve the best interest of the patient. Nurses are not only expected to provide care to patients but also advocate for patients’ rights and well-being and incivility prevents them from doing so. Thus, incivility interferes with the day-to-day practices in nursing. Overall, incivility affects the nursing profession because it contributes to the current nursing staff shortage. Incivility pushes nurses not only out of organizations but also from the profession itself (Mikaelian & Stanley, 2016; Warrner, Sommers, Zappa, & Thornlow, 2016). It also affects care delivery and patient safety (De Villers & Cohn, 2017). When nurses fail to seek help or even clarification from others, errors are bound to be made, which endangers patient safety and outcome, thus affecting the nursing profession and its ability to deliver quality patient care.
A good example of incivility in the nursing practice was unfairness. In this setting, the nurse leader disliked a particular nurse and she never bothered to hide her dislike. She was outrightly unfair to this junior nurse when it came to scheduling shifts and issuing patient assignments. At times, the nurse leader would even yell at the junior nurse for taking a break, yet she did not ye...