Incivility in Nursing: Unsafe Nurse, Unsafe Patients

摘要

Webster's dictionary describes incivility as "the quality or condition of being uncivil; discourteous behavior or treatment, an uncivil act," and the word uncivil as "without good manners, unmannerly, rude, impolite, and discourteous. " As a nurse who has observed and been on the receiving end of incivility from other nurses, this seems to me to be a very tame description. The nursing literature is rich with descriptions of various types of incivility, the most common being lateral (eg, nurse to nurse) and hierarchical (eg, nurse administrator or manager to nurse, nurse to student, faculty member to student, physician to nurse). The incivility described is usually directed from someone in a position of power toward a coworker who has less power, and it can be devastating to the targeted person, unsafe for patients, and costly for the facility.