"Nurses eat their young"

I am currently going thru interpersonal relations difficutlies at work. I cannot remember ever struggling as much with coworkers as I do in the health profession.

I am learning that a lot of nurses do not take care of themselves thus making them more irritable. In addition a lot of nurses are burnt out from the demanding job.

I found the following interesteing...

taken from: http://www.medhunters.com/articles/doNursesEatTheirYoung.html



"Nurses eat their young" is a frequent subject of discussions in nursing chat rooms, and is one of the top discussion threads on allNurses.com. For those unfamiliar with the phrase, it refers to the idea that older or more experienced nurses are unhelpful, unsupportive, critical, and even mean, predatory, and generally destructive in their interactions with new graduate nurses and nursing students.

“But even if it's not a problem unique to nurses, it's a problem that does exist. And to help solve the problem, the recommendations from nurses range from extreme ideas (e.g., warn once, then fire nurses who can't be kind to coworkers) to excellent ones that may not work due to liability issues (e.g., have recently retired nurses "who still have their grey matter functioning reasonably well" act as preceptors, to take pressure off the other nurses). Here is a summary of the suggestions from various discussion boards:

• Nurses: Support and respect each other, and model and promote supportive and respectful behavior. Think of the Golden Rule, and model the behavior you would like to have experienced, rather than the behavior that you have experienced.

• If you see someone being bullied, speak up. (This is especially true for experienced staff members.)

• Speak up to debunk the negative stereotype, and advertise positive experiences.

• Stop making generalizations about "eating the young."

• Don't expect that "being eaten" is a given.

• Experienced nurses: Don't think that new nurses know nothing, and don't think you know everything.

• New nurses: Don't think that you know everything, don't think that all older nurses are out-of-date, and don't let people make you believe that you know nothing.