Nurses Eat Their Young

goes into healthcare. It’s the same people, just grown up and now in scrubs. What’s interesting is the way they treat their patients isn’t the way they treat others, and it goes to show who these people are at their core.

Bullying happens when the bully itself has bystanders on their side. They pick on those who do not know the ways and essentially cannot fi t in. The victims tend to be those with no confi dence to fi ght for themselves.

Bullying in nursing can usually come from older nurses who were trained differently than modern nurses now. They are used to doing things in an old-fashioned way and have their own techniques and methods. They think that new nurses cannot live up to their standards.

Also, being an older nurse is a form of superiority to the new nurses that are just starting off on the unit. They have their way of running the fl oor and believe the newer nurses will be a burden to that.

Some examples of nurse bullying can include purposely not including calls for help, talking behind another nurse’s back and not being inclusive of other nurses. During a nursing shortage, these behaviors need to be fi xed to improve the overall future of healthcare.

Many unit managers are not equipped to deal with workplace bullying and aren’t even present for most of it as their job requires them to handle more of the business and administrative side. It’s easy for them to side with the older nurses with seniority even though this may not be fair. Being a student on rotations in the hospital, I have encountered nurses who were unwilling to work with me and would just ignore me and see me as a burden. It’s a diffi cult thing to deal with, especially when you’re trying to learn. Being a nurse is hard enough as it is after going through many hard years of work and starting off on the fl oor. It’s such an adjustment and new work-life balance, especially for newer and younger nurses starting off in their twenties after college. Older nurses need to realize that they were once in their place and give some grace as they adjust to this new job and all the responsibilities that come with it.

Additionally, newer nurses need to stand up for themselves. It is a scary and intimidating thing to do in front of people with seniority, higher degrees and more years of experience. But to make the fl oor and the fi eld a more welcoming place for themselves, newer nurses have to come in with confi dence that they can take on the challenge.

Some ways that they can stand up for themselves is for starters, to confront the bully. Call out the colleague or the precepting nurse about how they are treating them. Use evidence instead of emotions to justify the way they’ve been treated. Another way is to start a documentation trail and document all the ways