Lateral Violence In Nursing

216 Words1 Pages
Hospital largest human resource cost is nursing staff. Hospital allocate most of their personnel budget to nurse recruit and replacing staff. There is no secret that a nursing shortage exist, but nursing have a dirty little secret, which is, “nurses eat their young” (Sincox, 2010, p.8) or the more formal term lateral violence. Lateral violence is a nurse intentionally withholding pertinent patient information, assigning workload of total care and pain seeking patient, turning a blind eye or just plain sabotaging ones’ efforts (Thompson, 2013). One of the reason “new nurses leave their first staff job within the first six months due to some form of lateral violence” (Sincox, 2010, p.8). The nursing shortage coupled with lateral violence is driving