Nurse-to-nurse hostility, nurse bullying, and “nurses eat their young” are all common phrases that new nurses hear when entering the nursing profession. Imagine this scene: You’re a new, 25-year-old nurse and you ask an older, experienced nurse a simple question. The older nurse responds in an angry, know-it-all way, making you feel inferior to her. Later that day, the same nurse gives you a difficult patient to attend to, knowing...  Read More »

The Well blog in the New York Times this week explores an interesting and ever-present topic: why nurses bully each other, or “eat their young,” as many nurses call it. In it, Seattle nurse, consultant, and author Kathleen Bartholomew is mentioned-she literally wrote the book on the topic, which might be worth checking out: Ending Nurse-to-Nurse Hostility: Why Nurses Eat Their Young. The blog explores the reasons behind such...  Read More »

As part of our Nurses Week celebration, HCPro, Inc. included a quiz about Florence Nightingale in its nursing e-newsletters. We asked you to send us the answers. The reward for a perfect score? A chance to win a copy of the best-selling Ending Nurse-to-Nurse Hostility: Why Nurses Eat Their Young And Each Other. We received hundreds of entries and were tasked with choosing 10 winners. Here are the lucky nurses who, along with gaining some...  Read More »

“Bullies scan groups for the weakest. Maybe it is an evolutionary remnant of our place in the animal kingdom. All predatory species select and attack the weakest pray.” - The Bully at Work Whether a new hire, a transfer from another department, or a new resident nurse, any member introduced into a powerless group is at high risk for experiencing horizontal hostility. Horizontal hostility is used to break nurses into the group...  Read More »