Conflict as a contemporary organizational behavior that challenges healthcare delivery settings. Conflicts in healthcare Conflicts are a common occurrence among employees and many of the people usually try to avoid them at all costs. They can lead to poor leadership and patient outcomes within the healthcare setting.
Most of the health practitioners need to feel their presence in decision making and thus whenever they fail to be consulted, a conflict is most likely to occur and it is the role of the nursing leaders to ensure that the situations are maintained under control to ensure smooth running and provision of care.
There are some of the most common factors that result to conflicts within the health department and any organization in general. One of the common causes is poor communication. It can be between the clients and the staff or the staff and their managers (Jerng et al.,2017). Either way, when not effectively done and in a proper channel, the involved parties result in arguments and disagreements. It is important to ensure that everyone is well informed of what is pertained in information acquiring. Poor planning results in poor implementation and staff participation. If there is a solution to be made in an organization, people can get together in a group to talk about it so that the people themselves are more committed to the decision made. The most effective way is to ensure that everyone is informed and is involved in planning so that they can implement the organizational changes. Another major factor especially in health is frustrations, stress, and burnout. When nurses and staff members become overly misused and their grievances are not addressed, the situation is most likely to result to a conflict and poor management (Csupor et al.,2017). It is important to always consider their work environment and handle them the best way possible.
Examples of situations that result to conflicts in healthcare
Example one
Nursing is a profession involving achievement of quality care for all patients who seek health care. As a student, I joined the profession to try and change lives. Patients come in the hospital with a variety of complaints, and it’s upon the nurse to identify the main complains and narrow them down to the minor ones. Immersive experiences are the pillars to proper nursing in the management of adults (Brun 2016).
It’s not easy to administer patient care without being compromised and breeching the ethics and rights of the patient. I chose the interventions to administer according to the plan and management of every individual patient. When acquiring history during admissions, some patients ignore and choose to withhold very crucial information that could aid in their management. To ensure that total patient care is achieved, I have to table all the problems the patient suffers from and then act upon them accordingly. The patient presents with signs and symptoms closely relating to an STD. With the accompaniment of the husband, the wife is ashamed to explain all the signs in front of him. Withholding of the information agitates me considering that the purpose for the history is to provide a guided plan of action. The adult patients have their own ability to consent.
Compassionate care requires understanding the patient and most of the time supporting them through the health attainment process. However, the patient seems very withdrawn and withheld. She has a right to privacy and the ethical principle of autonomy she has all the rights to choose what she prefers. I discussed the matter with the other colleagues and the nurses told me to bring the patient in a private area where the husband could not be allowed. By maintaining privacy, the patient gave all relevant history to the illness which was very helpful in making the empirical diagnosis. A good nursing care plan is based according to prior knowledge obtained from the patient.
To provide comprehensive patient care, I had to let go of my view of the patient. Most at times is when we become judgmental and get our decision clouded which ends up affecting the level of patient care. For proper management of adult nurses it is dependent on the experience of the nurse with adult patients in the past. Unlike in the management of the pediatric patients, adult patients prefer more privacy. This means that the family does not need to be involved unless it is essential.
I approach each patient and every situation differently and considerably because of the patient’s rights. Professional judgment and placing the needs of the patients are some factors which collide in nursing, (Salminen et al.,2016). Whenever a case is brought to the ward, I have to analyze the type of the patient and the most pressing matters that have to be dealt with. For the mother, I advised her accordingly to try and prevent another incidence of such an illness from occurring especially because she was married.
Example two
Compassionate care and assessment for children requires connection of the nurse and the patient in order to promote understanding of the clinical symptoms and initiate effective management. Mothers blame the level of care and management to the primary nurse and whenever it’s not appropriate the blame is channelled to the nurse. Pediatric nursing is more complicated and challenging as it involves the care of children from birth to 18 years of age. The young children have the challenge of expression as they cannot adequately express themselves verbally. According to Bultas et al.,(2014), nurses are supposed to process and apply new information daily. Children have the most challenge of getting understood because some of them have not yet reached the age to speak. The mother explains some of the complaints but the history is not as definitive, and so it becomes the role of the nurse to figure out what is the main problem.
It was a challenge for me to explain to the mother of one of the patient the reason behind poor progress of the baby. At a certain point, the family is the important central part of caring for sick children. Trying to convince the parents the situation at hand and the development of their child’s case led to the increase of problems for me within the hospital. Nurses tried to support me but as healthcare dictates, the patient always comes first. I had to continually liaise with the parents of the child to make sure that care was provided. The foundation pillar for comprehensive care is the establishment of the principal vital signs. Compassionate care and assessment involved me going beyond my limits as the nurse to show extra concern and actually explain all the interventions and medications administered to the mother. The baby cannot easily explain what they feel; I had to establish this by understanding their grimace and expressions. They sometimes also cry to indicate discomfort or pain. For every procedure I had to demonstrate effective involvement by being there to support the mother through. With this I was able to win the support from the parents which led to establishment of proper therapeutic relationships. For successful planning in nursing without proper evidence, there is the inability of proper interventions (Jakubik et al.,2016).
Pediatric nursing does not involve the care of the patients only, but it articulates the parents as well. They should be assured and be involved in everything that happens with their child. They should be the pillars for decision making for the patient as they are not of legal age to do so. At this point is when most of the misdiagnosis happens as the health care team may be unable to empirically understand the clinical manifestations of illness as the children cannot eloquently address it. Whenever a pediatric patient is brought to the hospital most of the times, the condition of the baby may be worse as compared to when mature patients visit the hospital. Compassionate care is very essential in pediatric nursing as compared to other nursing fields, (Berger et al.,2015). This is the reason why most of the pediatric cases are emergency cases.
As a training nurse, it is imperative to understand pediatric communication. According to Brown (2014), contact is not only limited to verbal communication but also involves non-verbal communication and understanding of symbols. Through this, you can efficiently mediate through a situation and administer the appropriate intervention. As part of the comprehensive nursing care, the parents should be well educated on some of the danger signs that if noted the children should be rushed to the hospital immediately.
Systems theory approach
According to the systems theory approach, every organization is placed in social system that must interact within the environment for successful thriving. According to the theory, customers depend on the organization’s environment for various assistance such as; employees responsible for the provision of labor and management; purchase of products and services, investment by shareholders, and regulation by the government. Thus, the environment is the key determinant of the progress of any organization (Hespanha 2018). A positive environment is likely to result to ultimate success.
One of the systems theory approach is the open systems that was developed and adopted by Katz and Kahn to influence the behaviour of their employees and staff members. The theory determines the organizational behaviour through; repeated cycles of input, throughput, output, and the customer feedback. Through the feedback, the organization is able to determine if the services; input and throughput were effective in customer satisfaction. Such as is the case with the management of patients in hospital, how the react and respond to the services that they received is equivalent to make the practitioners of the services that they delivered.
Application of the theory in conflict management
Based on the systems theory approach, any organization is either closed or open. The difference is that for the open organizations, there is interaction with the immediate environment. Even though organizations have been classified as though, they cannot solely become open or closed. To manage the flow of services and patients within a hospital, there is need for maintaining a good environment. When the patients receive quality services and at timely delivery, conflicts will be very minimal.
What causes most of the conflicts at the hospital is the difference in service delivery. Patients prefer timely delivery of healthcare which is actually very important as the life of many patients depends on timely care (Sengupta & Chakrabarti 2018). With effective and quality services, conflicts become rare. Maintenance of a good organizational environment should be facilitated by competent nurses, adequate resources to care for patient’s needs, and affordability. Hospital management should ensure that the practitioners are highly qualified for their tasks and they should also maintain quality services at an affordable price.
Complete evasion of conflicts is impossible as human is to error. Thus, whenever mistakes happen during care especially due to miscommunication, the practitioners should discuss the matter with fellow staff members as well as the involved patients. Openness creates trust and maintains even when at fault. It makes the patient trust the services provided at the hospital. Proper communication at the hospital is ensured through effective documentation. Whenever there develops an issue with communication, the nurse leaders should ensure that the follow up on documentation appropriately. With good documentation, all staff members are well updated on the needs and progress of respective patients even without having to discuss it within anyone else. Some of the changes that are required to enable good communication between the patients and the nurses are ensuring that all patients consent to the services, they should be in the company of family when being admitted, and nurses should ensure that they document any procedure performed to the patient.
References
Berger, J., Polivka, B., Smoot, E.A. and Owens, H., 2015. Compassion fatigue in pediatric nurses. Journal of Pediatric Nursing, 30(6), pp.e11-e17.
Brown, A.B. and Elder, J.H., 2014. Communication in autism spectrum disorder: a guide for pediatric nurses. Pediatric nursing, 40(5).
Bruun-Pedersen, J.R., Serafin, S. and Kofoed, L.B., 2016, October. Going Outside While Staying Inside—Exercise Motivation with Immersive vs. Non–immersive Recreational Virtual Environment Augmentation for Older Adult Nursing Home Residents. In Healthcare Informatics (ICHI), 2016 IEEE International Conference on (pp. 216-226). IEEE.
Bultas, M.W., Hassler, M., Ercole, P.M. and Rea, G., 2014. Effectiveness of high-fidelity simulation for pediatric staff nurse education. Pediatric Nursing, 40(1), p.27.
Csupor, É., Kuna, Á., Pintér, J. N., Kaló, Z., & Csabai, M. (2017). Types of conflicts and conflict management among Hungarian healthcare workers. Orvosi hetilap, 158(16), 625-633.
Hespanha, J. P. (2018). Linear systems theory. Princeton university press.
Jakubik, L.D., Eliades, A.B. and Weese, M.M., 2016. Part 1: An overview of mentoring practices and mentoring benefits. Pediatric nursing, 42(1), p.37.
Jerng, J. S., Huang, S. F., Liang, H. W., Chen, L. C., Lin, C. K., Huang, H. F., … & Sun, J. S. (2017). Workplace interpersonal conflicts among the healthcare workers: Retrospective exploration from the institutional incident reporting system of a university-affiliated medical center. PloS one, 12(2), e0171696.
Salminen, L., Stolt, M., Metsämäki, R., Rinne, J., Kasen, A. and Leino-Kilpi, H., 2016. Ethical principles in the work of nurse educator—A cross-sectional study. Nurse education today, 36, pp.18-22.
Sengupta, M., Chakrabarti, S., & Mukhopadhyay, I. (2018). Conflict management in health care sector: An Indian scenario. International Journal of Education and Management Studies, 8(1), 153-161.
