In an editorial published in this week’s BMJ (British Medical Journal), Professor Rhona Flin, of Applied Psychology at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, said that if a person acts rude to you at work, or if you are in a working environment where you witness rudeness you are more prone to making mistakes.
This can be especially threatening to patient safety and quality of care in healthcare settings, where Professor Flin believes the link between rudeness and mistakes is of particular concern.
Research indicates that working in confined places – such as operating theatres – and watching rudeness occur between colleagues might impair the thinking skills of the team members’.
Professor Flin warns :
In surgical environments, all staff require high levels of attention and memory for task execution …. If incivility does occur in operating theatres and affects workers’ ability to perform tasks, the risks for surgical patients – whose treatment depends on particularly high levels of mental concentration and flawless task execution – could increase.
Rudeness in work is not unusual, in fact, it is much more common than people realize. In a survey of 391 NHS (National Health Service, UK) operating theatre staff, 66% of those surveyed said they had “received aggressive behaviour” from nurses while 53% said they had “received aggressive behaviour” from surgeons during the previous 6 months.
63% of respondents reported disagreements between surgeons and theatre nurses, while 58% reported disagreements between theatre nurses and ward nurses.
The main reason for the high percentage of disagreement was the management of the operating list.
According to scrub nurses, having to put up with surgeons’ tantrums and episodes of bad temper was common.
Professor Flinn said in a final statement :
People concerned with patient safety should note that civility between workers may have more benefits than just a harmonious atmosphere.
A threat to patient safety and quality of care
Rhona Flin
Published 19 May 2010, doi:10.1136/bmj.c2480
BMJ 2010;340:c2480
Written by Joseph Nordqvist