Assignment: Cultivating a Healthful Environment Essay

Assignment: Cultivating a Healthful Environment Essay

Assignment  Cultivating a Healthful Environment Essay

 

Introduction

Incivility is a common concern in the nursing practice. It is imperative to deal with incivility in the place of work because it compromises care quality and patient safety. It is possible to modify the nurse work environment, which implies that incivility and its negative impact may be reduced or eliminated (Lasater, Mood, Buchwach & Dieckmann, 2014). The American Nursing Association urges nurses to intervene whenever uncivil behavior arises in the organization. Incivility has an inauspicious impact on healthy, professional working relations in the organization (Babenko-Mould & Laschinger, 2014). This essay provides insight into the impact of incivility to the nursing profession. It uses a fictional case to explicate incivility and recommends strategies for cultivating a conducive work atmosphere in nursing education practice.

The Issue of Incivility

Incivility denotes the disruptive behaviors in the nursing practice settings that might result in poor patient safety or inauspicious effects on nurses. For instance, nurses may feel like quitting their practice when they experience incivility since it results in the loss of concentration, as well as frustration, and stress (Shi et al., 2018). They may often be absent from the workplace because it does not support their emotional and physical needs. The definition of incivility by Merriam-Webster Dictionary (2019) is discourteous or rude acts. Incivility refers to harassment, abusive language, horizontal or lateral violence, or bullying (Palumbo, 2018). It is the repeated abusive, offensive, insulting, or intimidating behavior. It also refers to cases of abuse of power, as well as unfair sanctions that make those in the workplace feel threatened, vulnerable, humiliated, upset, stressed, and less confident. Examples of uncivil behaviors are making humiliating or rude comments verbal threats, as well as a lack of support to employees (Zhang et al., 2019).

Importance to Nursing

In the nursing practice, nurses ought to understand the importance of incivility to both the patients and coworkers. According to Spiri, Brantley, and McGuire (2016), the consequence of uncivil behavior in the place of work is far-reaching as it can result in deteriorating relationship of co-workers, potential medical errors, as well as the self-worth of the victim. Nurses depend on relationships with their patients and colleagues, and incivility has detrimental impact on these relationships. Whenever there is incivility in the workplace, the nursing profession suffers. Workplace incivility promotes disrespect and results in poor retention of nursing employees. According to Asghari et al. (2017), in a nursing environment characterized by incivility, it is difficult to hire quality nurses and even harder to keep them for a long time. Ultimately, incivility can result in problems in the nursing point of care or profession. Uncivil behaviors are demoralizing to nurses and have inauspicious impact to their mental health, performance, as well as the intention to remain in their organization or profession. Uncivil behavior contributes to decreased work performance, nurse absenteeism, and increased turnover rates. Another serious consequence of incivility in the workplace is reduced patient safety. For instance, nurses may end up misinterpreting an unreadable order because they do not want to engage with rude physicians. They might also opt to ambulate or lift heavy patients without seeking help. In general, incivility negatively impacts the morale of nurse practitioners.

Click here to ORDER an A++ paper from our MASTERS and DOCTORATE WRITERS: Assignment: Cultivating a Healthful Environment Essay

Storytelling

In this case, incivility is exhibited through abusive language, intimidation, and humiliation. Miss X is a new RN at the hospital.

A difficult and manipulative male patient was assigned to her yesterday. Fellow nurses often avoid this patient because he humiliates them and wastes much of their time. He never adheres to simple directions, and he has been warned severally of smoking in the toilets. Nurses are worried about this patient because he is diabetic, and his risky behaviors may end up killing him. Miss X requested that the patient be assigned to a more experienced nurse, but this did not happen. She has to keep up with him until tomorrow. However, an incidence that happened today nearly made Miss X quit her nursing career. The difficult patient kept ordering her around, saying she did not know how to do her job. He threatened to hit her if she did not give him his medicine. At the time, Miss X was handing over to the daytime nurse, who would take care of the patient.  When Nurse Y came in, he found Miss X trying to reason with the patient, and he immediately began shouting at her. He said she was so incompetent that she could not help patients in need. Miss X felt so humiliated but did not respond to Y. She went home thinking about what would happen to her career if she had to deal with rude patients and unsupportive colleagues.

Creating a Healthful Environment

Combatting incivility in the nursing practice requires the use of several strategies by nurses. Three of these are training plans meant to ameliorate communication, personal holistic health and self-reflection, and cognitive rehearsal. Communication is critical in nursing practice, and nurses should maintain professional communication with their patients or between them (Clark, 2017). A healthful environment can be created through training programs because of improved communication skills, understanding, decreased burnout, development of respect, as well as increased awareness of human dignity and hospital policy (Darban, 2016).

The second strategy involves teaching cognitive rehearsal of predetermined responses or phrases, which can help avert bullying and incivility. Griffin and Clark (2014) consider cognitive rehearsal an efficacious approach to the creation of an empowering, safe, and non-threatening environment that enables nursing staff to have better communication. The third approach that can be effective in cultivating a healthful workplace atmosphere without uncivil behavior is encouraging personal holistic health and self-reflection through journaling. According to Martin-Cuellar (2018), self-reflection through journaling can help decrease the constant incidence of incivility. It is an effective approach to processing uncivil situations in a self-soothing and non-threatening manner.

Practice Application

In nursing education, incivility may impact safety, learning outcomes, and the academic environment unpropitiously. Both the students and nursing faculty members have an influence on academic incivility. Behaviors by the nursing faculty that contribute to the highest incivility incidence include getting late for planned activities; calling off planned activities with no warning, leaving early from planned activities, ineffectual teaching methods and styles, as well as subjective grading.

The first way to create a healthful environment in the nursing education setting through professionalism exhibited by faculty members in the course of all interactions and relationships with the nursing students and other people involved in the learning and teaching process (Peters, 2014). Cases of incivility undermine the nursing well-being, ethics, learning process, and the nursing profession in general. Any degree of incivility resulting from the nursing faculty negatively affects the profession in a way that might be unbearable (Peters, 2014). For this reason, institutions of nursing education should implement preventive strategies and zero tolerance policies that center upon getting rid of uncivil behavior.

Similarly, it is imperative that nursing education continuously engage in quality improvement processes like accreditation, which can contribute to the maintenance of professional education standards. Healthcare organizations engaged in nursing education should continuously evaluate and monitoring the state of incivility (Muliira, Natarajan & van der Colff, 2017). Besides, there is also a need to conduct studies that center upon modalities including policies and interventions, which are efficacious at curtailing or averting academic incivility.

In conclusion, incivility has been found to negatively impact the nursing performance, patient safety, and the nurses’ self-confidence. It results in an unhealthful work environment characterized by lack of adherence to policies and standards. To combat incivility, nursing organizations need to improve quality standards and maintain professionalism at all times. Journaling is a great strategy to ensure that nurses keep a record of uncivil incidences contributed by themselves or others. This can help avert incivility in the future. Teaching good communication skills and promoting cognitive rehearsal can significantly reduce potential uncivil behavior. In nursing education, I will prevent incivility in the future by promoting adherence to the guidelines and policies meant to discourage uncivil behavior. I will promote reporting of incivility incidents and urge leaders to deal with staff members who tend to mistreat their colleagues. Through this assignment, I have learned that uncivil behavior is prevalent in many workplaces but is rarely recognized or reported.

For assignments that need to be submitted to Lopes Write, please be sure you have received your report and Similarity Index (SI) percentage BEFORE you do a “final submit” to me.

Once you have received your report, please review it. This report will show you grammatical, punctuation, and spelling errors that can easily be fixed. Take the extra few minutes to review instead of getting counted off for these mistakes.

Review your similarities. Did you forget to cite something? Did you not paraphrase well enough? Is your paper made up of someone else’s thoughts more than your own?

Visit the Writing Center in the Student Success Center, under the Resources tab in LoudCloud for tips on improving your paper and SI score.

Late Policy

The university’s policy on late assignments is 10% penalty PER DAY LATE. This also applies to late DQ replies.

Please communicate with me if you anticipate having to submit an assignment late. I am happy to be flexible, with advance notice. We may be able to work out an extension based on extenuating circumstances.

If you do not communicate with me before submitting an assignment late, the GCU late policy will be in effect.

I do not accept assignments that are two or more weeks late unless we have worked out an extension.

As per policy, no assignments are accepted after the last day of class. Any assignment submitted after midnight on the last day of class will not be accepted for grading.

Communication

Communication is so very important. There are multiple ways to communicate with me:

Questions to Instructor Forum: This is a great place to ask course content or assignment questions. If you have a question, there is a good chance one of your peers does as well. This is a public forum for the class.

Individual Forum: This is a private forum to ask me questions or send me messages. This will be checked at least once every 24 hours.

Important information for writing discussion questions and participation

Welcome to class

Hello class and welcome to the class and I will be your instructor for this course. This is a -week course and requires a lot of time commitment, organization, and a high level of dedication. Please use the class syllabus to guide you through all the assignments required for the course. I have also attached the classroom policies to this announcement to know your expectations for this course. Please review this document carefully and ask me any questions if you do. You could email me at any time or send me a message via the “message” icon in halo if you need to contact me. I check my email regularly, so you should get a response within 24 hours. If you have not heard from me within 24 hours and need to contact me urgently, please send a follow up text to

I strongly encourage that you do not wait until the very last minute to complete your assignments. Your assignments in weeks 4 and 5 require early planning as you would need to present a teaching plan and interview a community health provider. I advise you look at the requirements for these assignments at the beginning of the course and plan accordingly. I have posted the YouTube link that explains all the class assignments in detail. It is required that you watch this 32-minute video as the assignments from week 3 through 5 require that you follow the instructions to the letter to succeed. Failure to complete these assignments according to instructions might lead to a zero. After watching the video, please schedule a one-on-one with me to discuss your topic for your project by the second week of class. Use this link to schedule a 15-minute session. Please, call me at the time of your appointment on my number. Please note that I will NOT call you.

Please, be advised I do NOT accept any assignments by email. If you are having technical issues with uploading an assignment, contact the technical department and inform me of the issue. If you have any issues that would prevent you from getting your assignments to me by the deadline, please inform me to request a possible extension. Note that working fulltime or overtime is no excuse for late assignments. There is a 5%-point deduction for every day your assignment is late. This only applies to approved extensions. Late assignments will not be accepted.

If you think you would be needing accommodations due to any reasons, please contact the appropriate department to request accommodations.

Plagiarism is highly prohibited. Please ensure you are citing your sources correctly using APA 7th edition. All assignments including discussion posts should be formatted in APA with the appropriate spacing, font, margin, and indents. Any papers not well formatted would be returned back to you, hence, I advise you review APA formatting style. I have attached a sample paper in APA format and will also post sample discussion responses in subsequent announcements.

Your initial discussion post should be a minimum of 200 words and response posts should be a minimum of 150 words. Be advised that I grade based on quality and not necessarily the number of words you post. A minimum of TWO references should be used for your initial post. For your response post, you do not need references as personal experiences would count as response posts. If you however cite anything from the literature for your response post, it is required that you cite your reference. You should include a minimum of THREE references for papers in this course. Please note that references should be no more than 5 years old except recommended as a resource for the class. Furthermore, for each discussion board question, you need ONE initial substantive response and TWO substantive responses to either your classmates or your instructor for a total of THREE responses. There are TWO discussion questions each week, hence, you need a total minimum of SIX discussion posts for each week. I usually post a discussion question each week. You could also respond to these as it would count towards your required SIX discussion posts for the week.

I understand this is a lot of information to cover in 5 weeks, however, the Bible says in Philippians 4:13 that we can do all things through Christ that strengthens us. Even in times like this, we are encouraged by God’s word that we have that ability in us to succeed with His strength. I pray that each and every one of you receives strength for this course and life generally as we navigate through this pandemic that is shaking our world today. Relax and enjoy the course!

Hi Class,

Please read through the following information on writing a Discussion question response and participation posts.

Contact me if you have any questions.

Important information on Writing a Discussion Question

• Your response needs to be a minimum of 150 words (not including your list of references)
• There needs to be at least TWO references with ONE being a peer reviewed professional journal article.
• Include in-text citations in your response
• Do not include quotes—instead summarize and paraphrase the information
• Follow APA-7th edition
• Points will be deducted if the above is not followed

Participation –replies to your classmates or instructor

• A minimum of 6 responses per week, on at least 3 days of the week.
• Each response needs at least ONE reference with citations—best if it is a peer reviewed journal article
• Each response needs to be at least 75 words in length (does not include your list of references)
• Responses need to be substantive by bringing information to the discussion or further enhance the discussion. Responses of “I agree” or “great post” does not count for the word count.
• Follow APA 7th edition
• Points will be deducted if the above is not followed
• Remember to use and follow APA-7th edition for all weekly assignments, discussion questions, and participation points.
• Here are some helpful links
• Student paper example
• Citing Sources
• The Writing Center is a great resource