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Donna McNeese-Smith, RN, EdD (center), has met many bullies in the 17 years she worked as a nurse administrator. An associate professor of nursing at UCLA, she now teaches her nursing administration graduate students how to combat bullying and other nonprofessional behaviors within their own medical facilities.

Many days Sarah, an RN from California, woke up filled with dread at the thought of going to work.Although she loved her job as an operating room nurse, she didn’t enjoy working in a hostile environment.

Her supervisor dispensed verbal abuse on a regular basis, routinely denying nurses vacation time, belittling their skills, and even setting them up with the wrong instrumentation in surgery.

“Sarah” (not her real name) is one of many nurses across the United States who has worked for a bully disguised as a supervisor.

The same bullies who once terrorized children in the playground now are creating havoc in hospitals.

Bullies aren’t new to the nursing profession, but the time has come when they will no longer be tolerated.

“Many nurses have accepted working in a toxic environment with control-freak physicians and out-of-control supervisors,” said Gary Namie, PhD, a social psychologist and founder of The Workplace Bullying and Trauma Institute (www.bullyinginstitute.org) in Bellingham, Wash. “Bullies have long ruined their quality of life and driven many good nurses out of
the profession.”

Enter a new crop of Generation X and Y nurses who are speaking out and challenging the concept of bullies in the workplace. “Many older employees thought bullying was an inevitable part of their jobs they were forced to tolerate,” Namie said. “Now, this younger generation is fighting back and refusing to suffer subordination for a paycheck.”

In the case of Sarah, she was among more than 20 nurses who complained to the administration about the bullying they endured on a daily basis from their supervisor. More than 40 physicians substantiated their claims.

“I remember a manager from human resources patting my shoulder and telling me that she’d been in her job for over 20 years and that I had to trust her that this would blow over,” Sarah said. “She assured me that these kinds of situations always blow over. But it didn’t, it only got worse.”

The final straw came when Sarah’s supervisor crossed the line from verbal to physical abuse.

“I was going to the restroom between surgeries when my supervisor approached and screamed at me to go back into the operating room,” Sarah recalled. “She grabbed me by the arm and yelled at me for questioning her authority.”

Sarah ended up being treated for deep nail scratches, bruises, and contusions on her upper and lower arm. Six months after Sarah left, another nurse in the same department was physically assaulted by another nurse manager.

“I really feel the system failed both me and my nurse colleagues,” Sarah said.

Extreme situations

Bullies in the operating room have become so commonplace that nurses have even coined a term to deal with the dilemma.

“You call a code pink,” said June (not her real name), an RN from Ohio. “Everyone encircles the nurse who is being bullied and we tell the physician or whomever is doing the bullying that this is unacceptable behavior for a professional and it won’t be tolerated by the nursing staff.”

Yet sometimes, bullies aren’t deterred by a show of force.

June, an operating room nurse manager, experienced bullying for almost a year by a physician who screamed, physically threatened, and belittled her and the other OR nurses.

“He had all of the OR nurses in tears on a daily basis,” June recalled. “You never knew when you would be the target of one of his outbursts.”

June and the other nurses documented all of the incidents and attended seminars on how to deal with difficult people.

“The techniques they taught us worked on other people, but nothing worked on this particular physician,” June said.