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. A nurse who saw this website contacted me and described her experience with it as being the worst punishment there is. She 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. And the people to whom she reported it did nothing. 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 serious 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. 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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