NUR 600 Discussion 11.1 Crucial Conversations

NUR 600 Discussion 11.1 Crucial Conversations

Healthcare professionals should work comfortably and in safe settings, free from disruptions. However, disruptive behaviors are widespread in clinical settings and typify workplace incivility, characterized by discourteous and rude behaviors toward colleagues (Atashzadeh Shoorideh et al., 2021). Disruptive behaviors significantly affect patient safety and should be addressed via honest conversations and sustainable approaches. Crucial conversations denote the determination to openly break the silence and address disruptive behaviors.

Among the crucial conversations, the administration’s failure to go public about the pervasiveness of concerns is typical in healthcare settings. Here, organizational leaders overlook the severity of disruptive behaviors and overlook their impacts. As Layne et al. (2019) noted, leaders’ failure to address disruptive behaviors influences negative behaviors among nurses, leading to negative clinical outcomes. The other crucial conversation I have seen healthcare practitioners and leaders struggling with is leaders not empowering caregivers adequately to confront disruptive behaviors. In clinical practice, disruptive behaviors are diverse and frequently occur. The lack of policies and practices to encourage nurses to speak up when they encounter problems is a significant barrier to patient safety and care quality.

Interventions to encourage crucial conversations imply a determination to prevent patient harm and unacceptable error rates associated with disruptive behaviors. An effective intervention to stop/deter disruption is adopting a zero-tolerance policy, which healthcare organizations use to prevent workplace violence (Murray, 2021). A culture change is crucial in healthcare settings to encourage reporting. Similarly, healthcare organizations should adopt a reporting culture that helps nurses to report disruptive behaviors instantly and anonymously. Leaders should also be committed to addressing disruptions immediately after they are reported and satisfactorily. Above all, nurses should be helped to identify disruptive behaviors through awareness training (Hicks & Stavropoulou, 2022). Their ability to identify disruptive behaviors, report them, and openly encounter them would be a significant step toward high patient safety and care quality.

References

Atashzadeh Shoorideh, F., Moosavi, S., & Balouchi, A. (2021). Incivility toward nurses: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of Medical Ethics and History of Medicine, 14, 15. https://doi.org/10.18502/jmehm.v14i15.7670

Hicks, S., & Stavropoulou, C. (2022). The effect of health care professional disruptive behavior on patient care: a systematic review. Journal of Patient Safety, 18(2), 138–143. https://doi.org/10.1097/PTS.0000000000000805

Layne, D. M., Nemeth, L. S., Mueller, M., & Martin, M. (2019). Negative behaviors among healthcare professionals: Relationship with patient safety culture. Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland), 7(1), 23. https://doi.org/10.3390/healthcare7010023