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Lateral respect
by
Tom Bissonnette, MS, RN
Executive Director of Nursing Practice & Operations
The Michigan Nurses Association provided a few “hot topics” for nursing continuing education during the International Women’s Show in early May. Topics included workplace safety, delegation, and whistleblower protection, yet the topic which generated the most interest was “lateral violence in the nursing workplace.”
Although a newly coined term, lateral violence, also known as bullying, has been present in the nursing workplace and well known to nurses for some time. It is something we do to each other on a peer to peer level. There are references you may pursue within this issue of the Michigan Nurse which will define lateral violence and expand more upon the topic. In this column I want to highlight for you a couple of comments from participants who attended the Women’s Show inservice and to introduce a related concept to you.
A few of the hundred nurses who attended were immigrants and had worked as nurses in their country of origin for several years before moving to the United States. Three made the comment that they had never experienced lateral violence in the nursing workplace prior to working in America, and that they had never heard of the equivalent term “nurses eat their young” in their country of origin. Yet, these immigrant nurses often hear from their American co-workers who have visited their home countries how the American nurses are appalled at their working conditions, where nurses do not seem to have the respect of physicians or administrators.
Michigan, and most of the United States, is on the edge of a disastrous nurse shortage. Parallel, concurrent strategies must be pursued and implemented to ease this disaster. To see what MNA is doing to limit the outcomes of this disaster, visit our web site at www.minurses.org.
Your involvement in the implementation of these strategies is crucial. One strategy in which each of us may personally engage is implementing the concept of lateral respect. Lateral respect is something we do to each other, on a peer to peer level.
Each of us is, thankfully, different. Different in how we apply our nursing critical thinking, different in how we relate to our world. Respecting our differences, encouraging each other as we work to provide high quality, accessible, and low cost patient care during this time of inadequate resources will improve nurse retention and begin to eliminate lateral violence. Instead, we will create lateral respect. |
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