Why do nurses eat their young Term Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Why do nurses eat their young - Term Paper Example Nurses who are older and who have more experience have the reputation on shunning the younger nurses away, making life difficult for them, in other words ‘eating’ them. For which reason, the younger nurses often experience great difficulty in starting their practice. Some of them often even end up leaving the profession altogether. This paper shall discuss and resolve issues on the question: why do nurses eat their young? This question is being answered in the hope of establishing a comprehensive and academic answer to this query and in the hope of improving the transition for younger nurses into the practice. Review of literature Various studies have been carried out on nurses eating their young. For purposes of this discussion, this practice shall also be referred to as horizontal violence among nurses. In a paper by Woelfe and McCaffrey (2007), the authors set out to evaluate if horizontal violence in the workplace is present in nursing and if it is, its relationship to patient care. This study was carried out as a literature review of articles published from 2003 and 2004 from nursing research databases. This study revealed that horizontal violence does exist in nursing today (Woelfe and McCaffrey, 2007). The study revealed that horizontal violence exists in the current context and it affects most areas of the nursing practice. In instances when tension is elevated in patient care areas, the nursing staff is often not likely to be at their best performance and the quality of their patient care is compromised. In a similar study by Oztunc (2007), the author set out to evaluate the incidents of verbal abuse encountered by nurses in the workplace. Data was gathered in about 290 hospital nurses in Turkey. The study soon established that most nurses faced verbal abuse. It also confirmed that there is a need to implement urgent and continuous plans in addressing verbal abuse in the workplace and in the adoption of zero tolerance (Oztunc, 2007). In ef fect, this study highlighted the alarming increase in violence between nurses which mostly registers as verbal abuse and bullying in the workplace. In a paper by Johnson (2009), the authors evaluated the nursing literature on workplace bullying in order to establish a better understanding of these incidents in the workplace. The CINAHL, PubMed, Pro Quest, and EBSCO databases were searched. This study revealed that workplace bullying is not just a simple contract between two individuals. This is also a complicated incident which can be understood by evaluating social and organizational factors (Johnson, 2009). Bullying has been known to affect the physical and psychological issues of victims, including their work performance. It also impacts on organizations due to their decreased productivity, increased sick time, and reduced quality of work (Johnson, 2009). The incidence of workplace violence and bullying in the nursing profession was also discussed by Hutchinson, et.al. (2006), th e authors discussed that workplace bullying is a significant issue in the nursing profession. It is often described in terms of oppressed group behavior. The oppressed group theory has set forth only minimal understanding of this phenomenon in nursing. This theory is said to place too much of an emphasis on bullying as a phenomenon in nursing, not one which is common in other professions as well (Hutchinson, et.al., 2006). Alternative methods of understanding this phenomenon have instead been suggested by other theorists in order to understand nursing workplace bullying. Saunders, et.al., (2007) discussed that various attempts at defining