Evidence Based Violence in Healthcare: Bullying in Healthcare

Bullying in healthcare
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Introduction
Workers in healthcare are exposed to violence such as physical assaults, bullying, lateral and sexual harassment. The paper will focus on bullying in healthcare where it will seek to determine magnitude of the problem, risk factors, outcomes and possible prevention and intervention strategies.
Magnitude of bullying
Bullying is prevalent in healthcare; Bullying is passed down from superiors or occur between coworkers. The bullying which occurs between coworkers is known as horizontal bullying. According to Etienne& Emerald (2014) internet-based survey conducted on 197 trainee nurses from Kentucky, Ohio and Indiana 72.6% of those novice nurses experienced one workplace bullying in the previous month. The novice nurses reported the bullying to be from experienced nurses.
According to Etienne& Emerald, (2014) a research conducted on healthcare bullying, 27.3% of the 249 emergency room nurses participated in the survey admitted to being bullied at workplace. 50% of those who reported being bullied identified bullies as directors and managers while 25% identified charge nurses as their bullies. Moreover, in a Turkish study 21% of the 286 nurses participated in the survey admitted bullying and reported that 39% of the bullying behaviors were committed by healthcare administrators. In addition, a research surveyed 674 nursing students established that the two main roots of bullying in the clinical location were clinical instructors by 30.25% and staff nurses by 25.49%.
Operational definition
Bullying in healthcare can be defined as recurring, awkward behavior aimed towards an employee or group of employees, that generate a risk to healthy and safety. The bullying can occur between health coworkers or passed down from senior or experienced health worker. In addition, bullying can passed from newer healthcare workers to veteran workers, especially when they are slow to adapt to new technology (Granstra, 2015).
Characteristics
Bullies in healthcare may exhibit characteristics such as the need to be in control and feel powerful. Senior healthcare worker would bully junior workers in pretence of exercising their authority. Through these actions the senior communicates to junior health workers that they are in control of every happening. In addition, senior health workers are worried of being replaced by new, techno savvy health workers. To defend their positions and prevent recognition of new skills of the new worker they resort to assigning them tasks below their competency level. Health care workers can also be given impossible targets or deadlines. For a department to be ranked as best in production, heads of department may give their healthcare workers high targets which are impossible to achieve. Moreover, the healthcare workers may be forced to work long hours to try to meet the targets. New healthcare workers can be ignored by experienced healthcare workers when they ask for assistance. The same experienced workers will ridicule the new healthcare worker work (Granstra, 2015)
Risk factors
Negative performance appraisal is a risk factor in health care bullying, healthcare professional may bully others to negat...