The Nurses: A Year of Secrets, Drama, and Miracles with the Heroes of the Hospital (9 page)

In news reports and hospital break rooms, stories abound of doctors berating nurses, hurling profanities, or even physically threatening them: shoving matches in the operating room; a surgeon pushing a nurse so hard mid-operation that he left a bloody handprint on her scrubs; physicians throwing stethoscopes, scissors, pens, or surgical instruments. Physical abuse by physicians is on the rise. In Maryland, a surgeon yelled at a male nurse, “Are you stupid or something?” and threw a bloody surgical sponge at him from across the room. A Texas doctor heaved a metal clipboard at an advanced-practice nurse and told her he was going to strangle her. A surgeon threw a scalpel at a Virginia nurse, who said, “He was angry because I didn’t have a rare piece of equipment he needed, so he endangered me and several others by throwing a tantrum.” North Carolina nurses referred to one doctor as “He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named,” because he got into a fistfight with another doctor and physically assaulted a nurse.

Most nurses have been victims of or have witnessed doctor bullying. The Institute for Safe Medication Practices (ISMP), a nationally respected nonprofit watchdog organization, has reported rampant bullying in healthcare, including verbal abuse, threatening body language, condescension, and, though less common, physical abuse. A 2013 ISMP survey on workplace intimidation found that in the preceding year, 87 percent of nurses encountered physicians/prescribers who had a “reluctance or refusal to answer your questions, or return calls,” 74 percent experienced physicians’ “condescending or demeaning comments or insults,” and one in four nurses had objects thrown at them by doctors. Physicians shamed, humiliated, or spread malicious rumors about 42 percent of the surveyed nurses. As a New York critical care nurse said, “Every single nurse I know has been verbally berated by a doctor. Every single one.”

This is a global problem. Significant numbers of nurses in Australia, South Africa, Hong Kong, Canada, and many more countries are bullied by doctors, according to surveys. In 2010, a nurse in India committed suicide reportedly because administrators would not address her complaints about a doctor who was sexually harassing her. A nurse’s association president said, “This case has not been taken seriously because the victim is a nurse.” In South Korea, a 2013 survey found that more than half of nurses were sexually harassed; the majority of the assailants were doctors.

Doctor bullying has many serious ramifications. A 2013 study found that the more that nurses experience it, the more likely they are to report poor working environments and to quit their workplace and/or the nursing profession. This is not the first study to find a link between doctors’ intimidation and poor nurse satisfaction, yet researchers repeatedly have found that most nurses don’t speak out against the behavior.

Why is hospital bullying veiled in organizational silence? Nurses are afraid to report doctors because they believe administrators will prioritize and refuse to penalize physicians who generate revenue or garner media accolades. They worry they might lose their own jobs in retaliation, and they fear the stigma of being perceived by colleagues as a whistle-blower.

If precedence is indicative, these fears are justified. A slew of double standards protect doctors’ jobs but hang nurses out to dry. Many hospitals have fired nurses for reporting doctors’ inappropriate or incorrect treatment of patients, while allowing the doctors in question to continue to practice.

In Florida, travel nurse C. T. Tomlinson saw Lawnwood Regional Medical Center cardiologist Abdul Shadani preparing to insert a stent in a heart patient although the patient’s scans revealed no arterial blockages. (A travel nurse is an agency nurse whose jobs are temporary assignments in various locales.) “Sir, what are we going to fix?” the nurse asked, according to a
New York Times
investigative report. Shadani said the patient had a 90 percent blockage and inserted the stent; Tomlinson told the
Times
that other staff in the room did not object. Soon after Tomlinson reported Shadani to HCA, Lawnwood’s parent company and the largest for-profit hospital chain in the United States, Lawnwood did not renew the nurse’s contract. An internal, confidential memo reviewed by the
Times
admitted the nurse’s contract was not renewed because of retaliation. HCA did, however, initiate an investigation that found issues with Shadani’s treatment of thirteen out of seventeen patients, including several other unnecessary procedures. Tomlinson was reportedly correct—and an ideal patient advocate, hoping to protect patient safety—but the hospital let him go. Meanwhile, at the time of this writing, Shadani still works at Lawnwood.

In 2009, two Texas nurses filed an anonymous ethics complaint with the Texas Medical Board against Dr. Rolando Arafiles Jr. for conducting dangerous practices that risked patient health, taking hospital supplies to perform at-home procedures, and pushing patients to purchase herbal supplements that he conveniently sold on the side. When the board informed Arafiles about the nurses’ complaint, Arafiles enlisted the help of the county sheriff, a friend and former patient who participated in his supplement business. At Winkler County Memorial Hospital, Arafiles tracked down personal information for the patients listed in the complaint and gave it to the sheriff, who contacted them to determine the nurses’ identities. The sheriff obtained a search warrant to seize the nurses’ computers, where he found the letter.

A hospital administrator fired both nurses, who had worked at the hospital for decades, and who had not signed their letter because they feared exactly this type of retaliation. They had resorted to filing the complaint after months of unsuccessful attempts to persuade hospital administrators to investigate the doctor. Worse, Arafiles and the sheriff convinced the county prosecutor to take the nurses to trial in criminal court, charging them with “misuse of official information,” a felony with a maximum penalty of ten years in prison and a $10,000 fine. Charges against one of the nurses were dropped and the other nurse was acquitted.

In turn, the nurses filed a federal lawsuit against the county, the hospital, the sheriff, and other officials, charging that their First Amendment rights were violated and that their firing and criminal charges had been retaliatory. The women won a $750,000 settlement. State prosecutors then went after the sheriff, who lost his license, was convicted of retaliation, and sentenced to 100 days in jail; and the county attorney, who was sentenced to ten years’ probation. Arafiles pleaded guilty to retaliation and misuse of official information and received a sentence of two months in jail and five years’ probation. As part of his plea agreement, he surrendered his medical license.

It is confounding that initially, the nurses were fired but the doctor was not. The medical board charged Arafiles with violations including sewing a rubber scissor tip to a patient’s thumb, using an unapproved olive oil solution on a patient with a bacterial infection, failing to diagnose a case of appendicitis, and performing a skin graft without surgical privileges. But not until Arafiles was charged with a felony did he lose his license. The Texas Medical Board allowed Arafiles to continue to practice as long as he took additional classes, paid a $5,000 fine, and agreed to be monitored by another doctor.

As a result of this case, the Texas Legislature passed a bill increasing fines against doctors who retaliate against nurses reporting unsafe care, and protecting those nurses from criminal liability. The Winkler nurses’ story doesn’t culminate in a tidy, happy ending, however. Because of the case, the Legislature passed another law prohibiting the Texas Medical Board from considering anonymous complaints against doctors. Meanwhile, the Texas nursing board still permits people to complain anonymously about nurses. In fact, an examination of policies and calls to nursing boards in every state revealed that doctors in forty-one states can report nurses to state nursing boards without having to identify themselves.

So not only did the two nurses who advocated for their patients by reporting unsafe healthcare get fired, arrested, and criminally indicted (their necessary and heroic actions damaging their careers and their incomes until they won their suit), but future nurses were dissuaded from reporting dangerous practices at all. “It is shameful that nurses don’t get the same level of protection as physicians. If nurses face the possibility of being outed and then prosecuted, they will think twice before turning in a dangerous physician,” said Alex Winslow, executive director of Texas Watch, a nonpartisan Texas citizen advocacy organization. “The lack of protection for nurses puts patients at risk.”

This unequal treatment is ridiculously unfair and glaringly unsafe. Nurses are caught in a terrible conundrum: When they report dangerous doctors, they can be fired. But when they don’t speak up, people can die.

The biggest problem with doctor bullying is that hospitals are not a run-of-the-mill workplace, where bullying might simply cause individuals’ feelings to get hurt or departmental tensions to rise, which are not trivial matters but are at least self-contained. In hospitals, what The Joint Commission calls “intimidating and disruptive behaviors” can lead to medical errors, increase healthcare costs, and harm patients. These consequences are possible because certain doctors refuse to listen to nurses or because nurses are too intimidated to ask questions promptly, if at all. Nurses have reported that they have caught themselves making mistakes, such as mislabeling specimens, because they were so upset, stressed, or distracted by a confrontation with a physician.

Approximately half of surveyed respondents told the Institute for Safe Medication Practices that doctor bullying had caused them to change the way they react when they believe a doctor has made a medication error. These nurses tend to succumb to pressure to administer the medication anyway or to suggest the doctor give the medication himself. As a result, many respondents admitted that they “had been involved in a medication error during the past year in which intimidation clearly played a role.”

A national study of 6,500 nurses and nurse managers conducted by the American Association of Critical Care Nurses reported that many nurses are too intimidated to voice their concerns when doctors make mistakes during surgery. Despite mandatory safety protocols like checklists, more than 80 percent of nurses are still worried about “dangerous shortcuts, incompetence, and disrespect” at their hospitals. Of the nurses who admitted that patient harm or “near misses” occurred because of a doctor’s safety violation, 83 percent did not report the violation.

While any staff member might badger another, researchers say that doctors bullying nurses are most likely to jeopardize patient safety. Botched communications appear to be the leading cause of avoidable surgical errors. More than two-thirds of medical professionals say that disruptive behaviors have caused medical errors or patient deaths. Separately, The Joint Commission has found that in healthcare organizations nationwide, 63 percent of cases resulting in patients’ unanticipated death or permanent disability can be traced back to a communications failure.

How long will these preventable tragedies continue? Researchers have proven these links as far back as the 1980s, when a study of Intensive Care Units revealed that “the most significant factor associated with excessive mortality was the degree of nurse-physician communication.” When nurse-doctor relations are poor, patients die unnecessarily. More recently, the Workplace Bullying Institute reported that the mother of a toddler hospitalized for burns thought her daughter was thirsty because she was frantically sucking on wet washcloths. The mother called nurses into the room twice during the night, but the nurses only repeated the doctor’s insistence that the girl was fine. The toddler died of dehydration, according to the institute, because the nurses were too intimidated by the doctor to question him.

The story is shocking, but it’s only one of countless examples of patients suffering because of healthcare providers’ failure to communicate effectively. Consider this anecdote, which nurses reported in a 2010 survey jointly conducted by the Association of periOperative Registered Nurses and the American Association of Critical Care Nurses. During the surgical safety checklist, nurses saw that a surgery was erroneously scheduled for one side of the patient while the patient-verified permit listed the other side. When the nurses tried to stop the plastic surgeon, he told them the permit was wrong. “The patient was already asleep and he proceeded to do the wrong side against what the patient had verified, which had matched the permit. We could not get any support from the supervisor or anesthesiologist. The surgeon completed the case. Nothing was ever done. We felt awful because there was no support from management to stop this doctor. . . . We felt absolutely powerless to being an advocate for the patient.” (No further information was provided.)

Alan Rosenstein, the medical director of a nonprofit hospital alliance, is one of the leading researchers of physician bullying. He has surveyed thousands of medical professionals, many of whom reported outcomes such as the following, which he disclosed in a
Journal of the American College of Surgeons
article:

• “Failure of MD to listen to RN regarding patient’s condition. Patient had postoperative pulmonary embolism.”
  
• “Cardiologist upset by phone calls and refused to come in. RN told it was not her job to think, just to follow orders. Rx delayed. MI [heart attack] extended.”
  
• “Communication between OB and delivery RN was hampered because of MD behavior. Resulted in poor outcome in newborn.”
  

In a presentation at an annual meeting of the Pacific Coast Obstetrical and Gynecological Society, researchers described similar issues among labor and delivery staff:

• “When a nurse reported to the physician that her patient was highly anxious and had shortness of breath, the physician told the nurse to give the patient some Ativan and take some herself. Later that evening the patient was admitted to the ICU with congestive heart failure.”
  
• “A nurse reported that the final sponge count was incorrect after a difficult tubal ligation. The physician was sarcastic and said that an expensive X-ray would be ordered because the nurse obviously suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder. A sponge was found in the patient.”
  
• “Doctor’s behavior has been hostile, aggressive, threatening, and escalating in the past months . . . including raging at charge nurses and unit director. . . . [L&D] nurses are working in a hostile environment and fear for their safety and well-being.”