New Healthcare Study Indicates Management’s Failure to Address Workplace Drama and Workplace Performance Issues Can Affect Resident Quality of Care
May 2017
On 5/10/17, McKnight’s Long-Term Care News ran an article citing to a recent study by Vital Smarts, a corporate training company,that interviewed 1,200 physicians, nurses and other healthcare staff and asked them to rate the below listed workplace issues in terms of: a) how common they are in the workplace; b) to what degree do they affect safety and care; and c)whether the issue is discussable/solvable with management. The workplace issues addressed and the participants response ratings to these issues are as follows:
- Poor initiative: Team members who take shortcuts and excessive breaks and don’t do their fair share of the work. 61 percent of the study participants said poor initiative was common and nearly three-fourths said it dramatically affected safety and care. 75 percent described it as “undiscussable.” The result: a widespread belief that laziness is the standard.
- Difficult peers: Colleagues who gossip, spread rumors, give people the cold shoulder, and are rude, sarcastic and mean. 50 percent of the participants said this behavior is common and two-thirds described its damaging effects. 78 percent confessed it could not be discussed in the workplace culture.
- Failure to hold others accountable: Managers who neglect to hold people to the required safety and culture standards. Three out of four participants said persistent management weakness undermines safety and quality of care and two-thirds said it is an open secret that cannot be addressed.
- Unresponsive physicians: Physicians who ignore phone calls, pagers, emails and are often late. While this concern was described as “common” by only 38 percent—a relatively lower frequency than other issues—when it happens 70 percent say it is “unsolvable”because it is also “undiscussable.”
- Managers who play favorites: Managers who give better hours, assignments and opportunities to a select a few. Just under a third of respondents said this is a frequent occurrence and almost three-fourths declared it undiscussable.
The authors of the study found that how an organization addresses these five workplace issues has a direct correlation with patient quality of care, patient/family satisfaction,and staff/physician engagement with patients and their families.
According to one of the study’s authors, “Healthcare is not immune to workplace drama. If anything,the stress and complexities introduced by long and difficult hours, power differentials among colleagues and mounting regulation ensures healthcare professionals will face interpersonal strain and frustration at every turn.These five problems aren’t the problem. The problem is that in most hospitals,few address them. What this research confirms is that if you can’t talk about high stakes staff issues, you can’t deliver great healthcare.”
