Promoting psychological safety in healthcare is the key to providing patient safety among the interdisciplinary healthcare delivery system teams. For the frontline staff in healthcare, psychological safety implies being heard, understood, as well as accepted without retaliation or fear. In other words, psychological safety significantly helps in creating the necessary conditions for the transformational dialogue to improve patient safety.
Challenges Associated with Psychological Safety
The delivery of psychological safety in healthcare is being faced by various problems, thereby making it difficult to provide quality healthcare services to the patients. For instance, a significant challenge is the verbal harassment of about 85 percent of nurses within these healthcare facilities. As observed by Edmondson, Higgins, Singer and Weiner (2016), when such types of workplace behaviors are unchecked or overlooked, nurses are most likely to feel psychologically unsafe. They thus are less apt to ask questions or even engaging with their co-workers. As a result, this can subsequently result in various problems, including patient falls, diagnosis, in addition to delayed administration of patient medication ( Campbell, Burg & Gammonley, 2015) . When this happens, it becomes more apparent that patients have to suffer in the hands of psychologically distressed nurses, and the ultimate result is the delivery of poor quality healthcare services to these patients.
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Key Healthcare Players Involved in this Problem
The most crucial healthcare players associated with psychological safety are the health managers and nurses. It is because healthcare managers are the ones who are involved explicitly in verbal harassment to the nurses, thereby psychologically affecting nurses. As a result, nurses are not motivated to deliver quality healthcare ( Aranzamendez, James & Toms, 2015). Nurses are also significant stakeholders involved in this issue. After verbal harassment, they do not feel the need for forgiveness so that they can deliver as per the patients’ expectations. It is mainly as a result of their intentional denial of their right of anger as well as from the aversion of a harmful deed. Therefore, nurse managers need to predict the psychological safety of nurses through various dimensions of forgiveness skills.
Possible Resolution to the Challenge
The most significant way nurses can utilize to avoid verbal harassment is to say no to it by refusing to bear the abusive behavior emanating from their nurse managers. Nurses can also consider calling a “code pink,” which is a personal signal provided to other nursing staff members to silently stand by the verbally harassed nurse in addition to bearing witness to the abuse ( Berry, Gillespie, Fisher, Gormley & Haynes, 2016). Such a technique would significantly assist nurses in carrying on with their nursing duties as it would respond to their disconnection and isolation feelings. However, such a move would have a positive impact on the verbally abused nurse since his/her concerns shall have been solved. On the other hand, this would negatively affect the nurse managers since they would feel as if they are being overpowered within the organization.
Drawing a Conclusion about this Problem and its Potential Resolution
The issue of verbal harassment in healthcare has resulted in poor healthcare services being delivered to patients as nurses become psychologically distressed and thereby becoming incompetent in executing their duties effectively. In most cases, nurses are often harassed due to minor mistakes that can even be solved privately between the nurse managers and the alleged nurses. Therefore, healthcare organizations should ensure that they employ competent nurse leaders who would be capable of dealing with such issues as they arise ( Budden, Birks, Cant, Bagley & Park, 2017). Finally, further research studies should be conducted, particularly on what causes verbal harassment in healthcare organizations, and how they can be mitigated before they become a serious issue. As a result, this would assist in delivering quality healthcare services to the patients.
References
Edmondson, A. C., Higgins, M., Singer, S., & Weiner, J. (2016). Understanding psychological safety in health care and education organizations: A comparative perspective. Research in Human Development , 13 (1), 65-83.
Berry, P. A., Gillespie, G. L., Fisher, B. S., Gormley, D., & Haynes, J. T. (2016). Psychological distress and workplace bullying among registered nurses. OJIN: The Online Journal of Issues in Nursing , 21 (3), 4.
Budden, L. M., Birks, M., Cant, R., Bagley, T., & Park, T. (2017). Australian nursing students’ experience of bullying and/or harassment during clinical placement. Collegian , 24 (2), 125-133.
Campbell, C. L., Burg, M. A., & Gammonley, D. (2015). Measures for incident reporting of patient violence and aggression towards healthcare providers: A systematic review. Aggression and violent behavior , 25 , 314-322.
Aranzamendez, G., James, D., & Toms, R. (2015, July). Finding antecedents of psychological safety: A step toward quality improvement. In Nursing forum (Vol. 50, No. 3, pp. 171- 178).
