Speaker 1: Welcome back to Nursing Uncensored. I am your host, Adrian Anne.
I am a nurse. I work in a clinic now.
I used to work in the hospital. I've been doing
this podcast for like seven years now, and I actually
did an episode back in April of twenty twenty that
I kind of wanted to revisit.
Speaker 2: What was I even doing.
Speaker 1: I don't even want to think about what I was
doing in April of twenty twenty.
Speaker 2: We don't.
Speaker 1: None of us have to think about what we're doing
in April of twenty twenty. Let's talk about something that
I do think is important and is valid, and I
think is one of many topics that I want to
address in the coming months.
Speaker 2: But I want to.
Speaker 1: Talk about like professional incivility bullying, that sort of thing
I've talked about how it occurs on the impatient unit
and how it can affect all sorts of things from
morale to teamwork, which you know all eventually trickles down
on leads to worst patient outcomes. But working anywhere in
healthcare means working closely with people under pressure. Most of
us are going to expect that there's going to be
some stress, short tempers, difficult days like those things all
happen that you know that is part of the job
and it comes.
Speaker 2: With the territory.
Speaker 1: But there's like a big difference between just having a
stressful workplace and having an uncivil one. One thing that
I've noticed in clinic culture is how easy it is
for subtle workplace sensibility to become normalized. It's not the dramatic,
obvious kind. It's the quieter version that kind of shows
up as gossip, exclusion, sarcasm, dismissive comments, like defensive reactions
to basic questions, or side conversations that leave certain staff
members feeling isolated, even targeted. It often starts small enough
that you question yourself and whether or not this is
really happening. Maybe someone suddenly becomes really cold, avoids speaking
to you unless absolutely necessary. Maybe questions are hostility instead
of cluarification. Maybe you know, any concerns you bring up
or reframed as drama or communication just straight up turns adversarial.
You might start hearing comments indirectly instead of people addressing
things professionally indirectly. But the hardest part of these situations
is that it can be incredibly difficult to explain to
people who aren't experience having that firsthand. Like I think
in the last episode I talked about how like how
do you describe that someone treats you differently or they
look at you differently, or you know, how do you
how do you quantify that? How do you track that?
If you look at it on paper, nothing major has happened.
There's no screaming match, there's no obvious policy violations. There's
just this growing sense that the environment has become emotionally
unsafe and unnecessarily tense, Like why this shit is already
so stressful?
Speaker 2: Why do we need to add.
Speaker 1: Another layer to this fucking onion? Healthcare in every environment
has a long history of minimizing these dynamics. We've all
heard people say like, oh, that's just how she is.
Oh they're just blunt, or they're direct, or you need
thicker skin, or you know, that's that's just the nature
of the job. But chronic incivility affects teams, whether leadership
acknowledges it or not. People stop asking questions, and we
know that, at least in nursing as a discipline, when
you stop asking questions, you become dangerous. This is like
a basic tenet of like nursing education, Like we're lifelong
learners and so we are supposed to remember that. Like
it's not just a matter of getting thicker skin, Like.
Speaker 2: It's do better, be better.
Speaker 1: So, yeah, people don't feel as comfortable asking questions. They
don't feel comfortable speaking up when errors are about to occur,
and in a procedural space or in an OAR, that
can be really dangerous. So it's like when people start
acting differently around you, you start feeling uncomfortable, you start
avoiding them. Maybe the things that are normally not an
issue become escalated misunderstandings because nobody feels comfortable having the
straightforward conversation. What makes these situations even more complicated is
that the people involved in these jobs are often good
at their jobs. Like we're not talking about you know,
people that have problems completing their tasks. Shit still gets done,
Lists are getting checked off, you know, patients are being seen,
work is getting done, neds are getting ordered. So the
interpersonal fallout is like just dismissed as like a personality conflict.
But professionalism is more than just task completion, Like you
can do a job extremely.
Speaker 2: Well and be a really disagreeable.
Speaker 1: Person healthcare relies on communication, trust, teamwork. Like if you
don't trust your team, that's not a great team. Like
that's true of any type of team. You can be
efficient and still create an environment that exhaust the shit
out of everyone.
Speaker 2: But as nurses, we're taught to.
Speaker 1: Tolerate discomfort, Like we're trained to do it trying to
hold our bladders for twelve hours, even though we know
it's terrible for us. But do we do it anyway? Yeah,
because that's what we're taught, we're supposed to do. It's
how we're pushed. So we tell ourselves not to be sensitive.
We keep moving, We try to just keep going, and
the whole time we're dealing with shit that should not
be happening, you know. And then you're trying to stay
professional while the other people may not be staying professional.
So it's like, how do you play by the rule
and when when nobody else is playing by the poor
there's like an overall I don't know theme to this,
and that's that there's a difference between being resilient and
just accepting chronic disrespect and unprofessional behavior. One of the
most important things someone can do in this kind of
environment is to stop internalizing the behavior. A lot of
healthcare workers, especially newer staff members, immediately start wondering, am
I too sensitive? Am I communicating badly? Am I the
common denominator? And that's like I don't want.
Speaker 2: To discourage that.
Speaker 1: Self reflection is healthy, but chronic incivility as a way
of making reasonable people over analyze themselves while the actual
inappropriate behavior goes totally unaddressed. Protecting yourselves and these environments
often means becoming very intentional about things. You have to
focus on keeping your communication professional, direct and calm, even when,
as I said, other people are not playing by those
same rules. It means resisting the urge to defend yourself
emotionally every time someone makes a passive, aggressive comment tries
to like bait you. It means documenting patterns privately. Behavior
starts affecting the workflow, the communication, the way take care
of your patients, any of that. And unfortunately, it also
means that understanding that not every work dynamic, every not
every workplace dynamic can be fixed through just being honest
and open. Most nurses are conditioned to believe that direct
communication is going to solve any problem, and sometimes it does,
but in unhealthy workplace cultures, direct conversations always you know,
I shouldn't say always, that's that's an over dramatization. But
like in these types of workplaces, this can lead to
more gossip, retaliation, and like it just becomes emotionally exhausting
and stupid.
Speaker 2: Sorry, but it's stupid.
Speaker 1: It doesn't mean that we should become cold or distrustful
of our coworkers. It means that we have to learn
setting and keeping boundaries. Not every coworker deserves access to
your personal thoughts, frustrations, vulnerabilities, or rationalites. Not every criticism
requires a defense, Not every sarcastic comment deserves my engagement,
your engagement. Sometimes professionalism is less like winning people over,
and it's more like staying steady, protecting your reputation, remaining objective,
like keep it to the facts, don't participate in gossip,
which is so hard. As nurses, we regenerate and get
power from gossip at the nurses station and in the
bedroom and in the breakroom and in the elevators. But
we can't we can't let ourselves fall victim to it,
and we have to keep reminding ourselves that, like, oh,
you talk some shit in the breakroom. Well, don't do
that again, at least not for today and then tomorrow
make that same promise. Keep healthy relationships with your sane
and emotionally mature co workers as well, because if you
feel alone and a sea of people that are just
kind of passively and slyly shitty to you, like you
got to have people around you so that you don't
just hate every second.
Speaker 2: Of every day you're at your job.
Speaker 1: You also got to remember, like we are here for
patient care. Our patients want to know that we're not
having like all this interpersonal conflict in the background. They
want to feel safe, They want another shit is being
done well and that every member of the team is
functioning at optimum whatever functioning. And here's the thing, this
is also the hard thing, is that you have to
pay attention to how leadership responds in these situations. Healthy
leaderships address patterns of incibility because they understand the morale, communication,
and the safety of our patients. They're all interconnected. Unhealthy
leadership or unhealthy leaders or HR or whoever. They minimize
everything as drama until larger conflicts develop, and this can
lead to like turnover, burnout, just bad things happening like why.
That's the thing is like, as I think about this
and I talk about this, I'm like, why it is
such a waste of energy?
Speaker 2: Some people just like to fight.
Speaker 1: I don't know. And that's another bigger, difficult truth in
this situation, is it? Sometimes the issue is bigger than
one difficult coworker. Sometimes the culture itself just quietly rewards clicks, hostility,
acting nice in front of certain people and not in
front of others, because productivity and making sure shit is
getting done is prioritized over professionalism and civility among their coworkers.
Most nurses are not expecting to have like a perfect workplace,
and they don't expect to like love and get along
with every single one of their coworkers. We just want
environments where like we can ask a question without getting
our head bitten off, concerns can be addressed directly so
that our patients get what they need without a lot
of like dilly dally. We want people to like communicate
like adults and not take a tone of like nobody
should be talking like anybody else to anybody else like shit,
and team members should not feel punished or retaliated upon
for speaking up when things get out of hand, that's
not unrealistic. It's basic healthcare professionalism, and honestly, healthcare would
function a lot better as a whole if we stop
treating incivility is an unavoidable situation with lots of strong
personalities in one place, and we started recognizing it for
what it is.
Speaker 2: It's a workplace issue that affects.
Speaker 1: Everyone and ultimately creates worse outcomes for our patients. I
encourage you to find ways to remind yourself that you
do not deserve to be treated poorly. You are there
to do a job in exchange for a paycheck, and
if you are performing the functions of that job properly,
that's great. You should not have to worry about whether
or not you're going to be socially, psychologically, emotionally punished.
That's how we burn people out.
Speaker 2: That's why people leave.
Speaker 1: They either tolerate it for a little bit longer, or
they leave. And this is not how we should be
governing our already really fragile web of nurses in our
cracked and bleeding healthcare system. So those are my two cents.
I would love to hear what you think in the comments.
The blog post can be found at nursingusensor dot com
and thanks for coming back. We'll try to do this
again soon.
Speaker 3: The Nursing Uncensored podcast, like nursing itself, can be intense.
We don't sensor, but we do protect private health information
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We're not talking about you, your mem and your boss's
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responsible for doing your own research and not taking anything
we say as medical advice. The opinions expressed here are
the responsibility of the person expressing them and do not
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hope you learned something, laughed a little, and then you'll
come back