Abstract
ObjectiveThere have been concerns about the workplace interpersonal conflict (WIC) among healthcare workers. As healthcare organizations have applied the incident reporting system (IRS) widely for safety-related incidents, we proposed that this system might provide a channel to explore the WICs.MethodsWe retrospectively reviewed the reports to the IRS from July 2010 to June 2013 in a medical center. We identified the WICs and typed these conflicts according to the two foci (task content/process and interpersonal relationship) and the three properties (disagreement, interference, and negative emotion), and analyzed relevant data.ResultsOf the 147 incidents with WIC, the most common related processes were patient transfer (20%), laboratory tests (17%), surgery (16%) and medical imaging (16%). All of the 147 incidents with WIC focused on task content or task process, but 41 (27.9%) also focused on the interpersonal relationship. We found disagreement, interference, and negative emotion in 91.2%, 88.4%, and 55.8% of the cases, respectively. Nurses (57%) were most often the reporting workers, while the most common encounter was the nurse-doctor interaction (33%), and the majority (67%) of the conflicts were experienced concurrently with the incidents. There was a significant difference in the distribution of worker job types between cases focused on the interpersonal relationship and those without (p = 0.0064). The doctors were more frequently as the reporter when the conflicts focused on the interpersonal relationship (34.1%) than not on it (17.0%). The distributions of worker job types were similar between those with and without negative emotion (p = 0.125).ConclusionsThe institutional IRS is a useful place to report the workplace interpersonal conflicts actively. The healthcare systems need to improve the channels to communicate, manage and resolve these conflicts.
Highlights
Interpersonal conflict is an important type of conflict [1] that a variety of its nomenclature exists, such as task, process, information, emotional and relationship conflicts [2,3,4]
All of the 147 incidents with workplace interpersonal conflict (WIC) focused on task content or task process, but 41 (27.9%) focused on the interpersonal relationship
The main finding of this study was that the employee of the hospital applied the incident reporting system (IRS) to actively report the workplace interpersonal conflicts (WICs) the IRS was originally designed for the reporting of safety events
Summary
Interpersonal conflict is an important type of conflict [1] that a variety of its nomenclature exists, such as task, process, information, emotional and relationship conflicts [2,3,4] This kind of conflict is often regarded as a negative term because individual interests are perceived to be opposed or negatively affected [5]. The WICs were commonly encountered in intensive care units [8], operating rooms [9] and emergency rooms [10, 11] These high-risk health care areas often require intensive patient caring, timely decision-making, and multidisciplinary coordination among the workers [12]. Reports have associated WICs with lower-quality patient care, higher rates of medical errors, a higher level of staff burnout, and greater direct and indirect costs of care [17]
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