The healthcare sector is one of the most important aspects that contribute to human wellbeing and development. It accounts for the provision of treatment and care to people suffering from various mental and physical ailments restoring their normal health status. To make this possible, healthcare workers must perform their duties in a well-deserving environment without fear or doubt. However, there has been an increased level of bullying of new nurses by older workmates in many healthcare facilities. This practice takes different forms like intimidation, the threat of violence, and discrimination (Spence Laschinger, Wong, & Grau, 2012) . Another type of bullying is sexual harassment mostly where female workers were threatened by male counterparts for sexual favours. Bullying of new nurses has the effect of limiting their exploitation of full potential and in turn prevents better service delivery. While various experts have proposed and implemented various strategies to stop this vice, it is still persistent in some healthcare facilities calling for new and better approaches.
Literature Search Strategy
The paper focuses on bullying, its forms, and measures that can be put in place to mitigate it. To get to the bottom of the matter, PICOT format is used where the patients are the new nurses who face this form of intimidation while the interview is the intervention method used. The new findings will be compared with earlier results to monitor the progress and finally making appropriate outcomes. To gather the appropriate information about bullying, the study was carried out in the U.S within 2 weeks in five different health facilities. An interview was done on twenty new nurses who had worked for not more than six months. The research used the feedback given to form the basis for developing policies that will eradicate bullying in many hospitals. From this study, it was found that many nurses experienced different forms of bullying from their older colleagues during their early days in their workplaces.
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Analysis
The research revealed that bullying was still rampant in many healthcare facilities across the country. Many of the interviewees said that they had experienced different forms of this vice in their early days in their new workplace. They include intimidation, the threat of physical and mental harm, and discrimination. Senior workers and those with many years in specific centres were the greatest perpetrators of bullying to junior workers (Read & Laschinger, 2013) . However, the findings showed that bullying was on a steady decline from previous years indicating the significant success of some of the preventive measures put in place. Those policies include encouraging new healthcare workers to come out and report those cases, offering education about the dangers of bullying, and changing the existing culture that normalized this vice. From the findings, it was evident that bullying has a big effect on service delivery in various health facilities.
Many of the respondents claimed that they were unable to execute their duties in the right manner due to fear of being bullied by older workers in a healthcare facility. This greatly affected health services delivery and failure by the healthcare facility to meet its goals. Another effect of workplace bullying was the general mental and physical wellbeing of bullied nurses. They reported having developed stress-related problems and a lack of concentration on their work leading to a general decline in overall performance. Finally, bullying can lead to increased transfer of health workers from a certain facility with a high level of this vice. Many new nurses expressed their desire to move away from colleagues who subjected them to various forms of this behaviour.
Nursing Theory Used
The research used the mid-range nursing theory to develop appropriate concepts and abstractions based on nursing practice strategies and theory-based research. The benefit of this theory is its ability to produce verifiable and tangible results as compared to other strategies. In investigating the effect of bullying, this mode of nursing research will help in developing accurate results while proposing tangible solutions (Smith, 2005) . From the research carried out, the vice greatly altered service delivery to patients in different healthcare facilities. Some of the direct effects of bullying to new nurses were stress-related conditions and underperformance in their duties. Another one may be unsettledness where the victim felt the need to move out of the new workplace.
Proposed Implementation Plan
The plan involves several steps to communicating with concerned individuals to get a better response to the bullying problem. It includes talking to the perpetrator and the victim to get to the bottom of the vice. This plan will also help the researchers develop better strategies to address the vice. The first step involves identifying the problem. The study revealed that bullying of new nurses was rampant in various healthcare facilities requiring a combined effort between various players. The next step involves stopping bullying by taking disciplinary action against the perpetrator. Lastly, the administrator needs to talk to the victim and the bully to understand the reason for this practice.
After implementing these steps, an assessment model was developed to monitor the outcome of this intervention plan. This was done a month after the research by interviewing the victims of bullying. From this process, it was revealed that the practice reduced drastically showing the effectiveness of this intervention plan. By talking to the bully and the victim, the study produced better results in revealing the root cause of the problem. This will drastically change service delivery in the healthcare system in many facilities.
Proposed Nursing Intervention
To mitigate the effect of bullying, the affected people need to be put in specialized care to enable them to get back to their normal life. It was evident that this vice greatly affected the mental and physiological wellbeing of new nurses and in turn affect their performance. Educating them on the need to report cases of bullying by their older colleagues will allow a faster solution to the problem while eliminating the fear that may exist among them. This in turn enables nurses to perform to their maximum capabilities and improving patient care. Talking to the bully also greatly unearths this vice making the administrator develop better counteractive measures.
Potential Barriers to Plan Implementation
Despite using communication as an ideal intervention showing better results in tacking nurses' bullying, this plan faces various barriers that may limit the achievement of the overall goal. The first obstacle to this implementation process is the lack of accurate data to form a report. The bullied nurses may not give the appropriate information or may fail to disclose any of it for fear of further victimization. This will greatly affect solution formulation making bullying hard to eradicate. The new nurses will continue suffering without revealing making them not perform to their level best in their different capacities. This in turn affects service delivery and patient care in many healthcare facilities. The second barrier to this implementation plan is the lack of appropriate mechanisms and systems to develop better solutions to the bullying problem. With this method not giving fully reliable data, the administrators may not be able to eradicate this vice requiring different approaches. This means that bullying may continue even after different measures are put in place and, in turn affecting the delivery of quality patient care.
References
Read, E., & Laschinger, H. K. (2013). Correlates of new graduate nurses’ experiences of workplace mistreatment. Journal of Nursing Administration . https://doi.org/10.1097/NNA.0b013e3182895a90
Smith, A. C. (2005). Middle Range Theory for Nursing. Clinical Nurse Specialist . https://doi.org/10.1097/00002800-200501000-00015
Spence Laschinger, H. K., Wong, C. A., & Grau, A. L. (2012). The influence of authentic leadership on newly graduated nurses’ experiences of workplace bullying, burnout and retention outcomes: A cross-sectional study. International Journal of Nursing Studies . https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijnurstu.2012.05.012
