It's not only threatening the profession, it's putting patients' lives at risk.
), examining a subculture the public knows little about. The nursing profession demands a lot from its ranks: 12-to 14-hour shifts coping with traumas, managing grotesqueries, soothing distraught family members. And they do it with a calm and grace that belie just how complicated their jobs really are. The women and men I spoke with exuded the compassion and selflessness we've come to expect from nurses, traits that make it easy to understand why the country's 3.
Even when cliques aren't behaving badly in critical situations, they still unsettle nurses and affect their job performance. At a Virginia hospital, a group of senior nurses have a history of mistreating younger coworkers."I've seen them give someone multiple patients who need one-on-one care, then watchwhile the nurse struggles and runs around," says Megan, 30, a labor and delivery nurse."They're spending 99 percent of their time gossiping.
Victims of nurse bullying rarely have legal recourse because woman-on-woman aggression isn't discriminatory."Unless there's sexual coercion, there's no legal protection. If you're the same gender, same race, you're stuck," Namie says."Bullying is primarily legal in America." Such behaviors can be found in any profession, of course. But in nursing, communication is paramount for the hyper-accurate teamwork necessary to treat patients. When communication breaks down—between nurses or between nurses and doctors—patients' lives are at risk.
Why is bullying so frequent among nurses? Many nurses assume that because the workforce is 91 percent female, they are destined to resort to backstabbing and cattiness. But the"girls will be girls" argument only demeans a field of smart, strong women passionate about their jobs. Scholars contend that nurses are a beleaguered population because of a history of powerlessness and submissiveness to mostly male physicians and administrators.