Bullying in Hospitals: What’s the Solution?

The focus of this year’s Marseille Patient Safety Educational Roundtable is to develop solutions for disruptive behavior in medicine. Some of the required reading for the week examined how other health systems are confronting issues such as bullying in the workplace. Our patient safety and quality experts from Australia, Kim Oates and Cliff Hughes, have shared information on the New South Wales health policy statement on how to combat bullying in the workplace. A second reading, an article by A Lazare & R Levy in Chest (Chest 2011;139;746-751), discusses how humiliation in medicine leads to less than optimal care, and offers strategies on how to apologize for inflicting such an offense so that healing follows.

A post on the physician led blog, KevinMD entitled “Hospital bullying requires everyone to share in the blame and solution” written by Kevin Pho himself, addresses the need discussed this past… Continue reading →