Throughout our lives, we are always going to be in situations where we will need to deal with difficult people whether they are physicians in the work environment, co-workers or people in our personal life. In my 35 years of experience in healthcare administration and as a CNO, I never tolerated abuse of my staff in any way, and over these years I had been involved in several investigations that have led to the discipline action or loss of privileges for abusive physicians. Abuse of physicians by nursing staff was also not tolerated and probably as many nurses lost their positions for inappropriate behavior over the years. Especially with the need for healthcare workers to function as a team, it is critical for people to treat each other with respect and dignity. All that said, there are still going to be situations where nurses are abused by physicians and other people in the work environment and there are things to do to prevent, minimize and resolve such issues.

Abuse from physicians is difficult to handle because nurses are, for the most part, under pressure throughout the course of the work day. When abusively confronted, there is a loss of balance and personal control that arises first followed by an assault to the ego, which evokes an emotional response of anger, hurt and insignificance. Read more…

We live in a world of constant pressure and stress, which seems to be getting more challenging all the time. Especially in healthcare, organizations are forced to do more with less, putting pressure on the staff to exceed the superhuman pace that they are currently working at. Nurses are especially vulnerable to this level of stress because it seems that we, as a profession, are always “picking up the slack” when cutbacks are made in other departments or holds are placed on hiring. I used to laugh in my leadership positions when the CEOs would say, “but we’re not cutting nursing positions”, and, as a CNO, I would argue in a sense, yes, we are. When nurses “pick up the slack”, nurses are absent from the bedside, performing tasks that can be done by other people and at a premium cost. As nurses, we can also add on the emotional stress of what we deal with on a daily basis, followed by the tremendous responsibility of having precious lives in our hands. Oh, and let us compound the work stress by layering on family responsibilities, school responsibilities, day to day activities of survival, and, let’s not forget, somewhere in there we need to sleep. Read more…