Horizontal Violence in Nursing Nursing is a rewarding and growing profession. Yearly, there are about 155,000 new graduate nurses (Changes in, N.D.). Despite this, many organizations are still under the stress of understaffing. This can be due to a concept best known as horizontal violence in nursing. Many think that bullying is an issue that occurs more often with minors in a school setting, but horizontal violence in nursing negates this thought. Horizontal violence in nursing is best defined as “bullying that occurs between coworkers” (Granstra, 2015). This bullying cannot only negatively affect seasoned nurses, but also new graduate nurses that may lack confidence in their abilities as they are new to the field. Consequentially, this can …show more content…
Horizontal violence in nursing is a factor that drives many nurses away from certain jobs or patient care units. This can end up being quite costly for an organization. For example, a lot of time and money goes into training new nurses to the patient care unit as well as new graduate nurses to the profession. Some may require more training than others and this can be costly for an organization. When horizontal violence in nursing occurs, these new nurses may be driven to leave their jobs secondary to their dissatisfaction with their job. When this happens, all of the time and money spent training that nurse is wasted and the organization will then need to spend that money again training a new replacement …show more content…
As described above, horizontal violence in nursing can lead to a negative outcome in regard to mental health. Absenteeism can be directly related to this negative outcome because nursing staff may feel the need to call in rather than go to work. When this occurs, management then has to scramble to find coverage for the shift. If they are unable to find coverage, incentives may be offered in an attempt to entice staff to pick up the shift. These incentives can include things such as time and half for pay, which can negatively impact the organization