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| Bullying and MobbingCharmaine Hockley wrote a book about it called Silent hell: workplace violence and bullying. It is a study of workplace violence among female nurses. It examines how they rationalize antisocial workplace behavior. "Mobbing can be understood as the stressor to beat all stressors," says Dr. Kenneth Westhaus, a professor at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. According to him, the typical mob victim is a good-to-high achiever personally invested in a formally secure job who somehow threatens or shames co-workers or managers who then decide to get rid of him or her. This is endemic in medicine. In health care people do not get fired for failing to report (for instance, see Majors). They get fired, or otherwise punished, for reporting, with consequences that ultimately are fatal for members of the patient community. A nurse who saw this website contacted me and described her experience with it as being the worst punishment there is. Unless you have experienced something like it, it could be difficult to appreciate how bad it is. People who have been the victims of violent crimes who then had to go to court, where they were vilified as though they were the aggressors, say that the trial was worse than the crime. The trial is what gives them nightmares and makes so dysfunctional that they stay home and hide afterwards. Mobbing and bullying is a similar kind of social punishment - a group of people who make a judgment and pass a sentence against you. The nurse who described it as being "the worst punishment there is" was excluded from the group in the same way Rosemary Vossler was (see loyalty). She had tried to report a male pediatric nurse who, for six years, had been physically abusive of the children in his care. Finally it got so out of hand that she believed that a patient would die. She reported it and the medical community united against her the same way it united against Rosemary Vossler. The supervisors to whom she reported it did nothing, which is characteristic in medicine. There are those who think that life is about being part of a community, and that any meaning found in life comes from how you effect your community. When your community turns on you, bans you, and punishes you, what could be worse? Patient safety initiatives often include calls for reducing repercussions for reporting, but I have yet to see any that address social repercussions like these, the ones brought informally by the group. I have yet to see any initiatives that even recognize these as a problem with consequences for patient safety. Sentiments like "people don't go to work to do a bad job" dismiss all the ways in which they do. The result is those ways being left unaddressed. Healthcare professionals bully disloyal colleagues into silence. It is one of the bricks in the unacknowledged wall of silence in medicine. |
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