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In the complex health care workplace of nurses, intra/interprofessional ideals intersect with the expectations of patients, families, students, and coworkers in a context of managed care environments, academia, and other health care enterprises. Integral to quality assessment, management, and assurance is collegial and respectful communication. Decades of reported descriptive and anecdotal data on intra/inter professional and on client communication, describe the antithesis of these ideals. Specifically, increasing frequency and rates of persistent bullying, harassment, or horizontal violence (BHHV) have shown to yield detrimental effects on workplace satisfaction, workforce retention, and the psychological and physical health of nurses as well as implied effects on quality of patient care and risk of poor health outcomes. Persistent BHHV among nurses is a serious concern. In advancing the science of description and explanation to a level of prevention intervention, explanatory models from biology, developmental psychology, intra/interpersonal interactionism are described along with theoretical explanations for the prevalence of BHHV in nurse workplaces. Making the connection between explanatory models and creative solutions to address BHHV through multiple levels of behavioral influence such as individual, environmental, interpersonal, and cultural contexts is key to advancing the science of the relationship between professional behavior and client/family/community health care outcomes.

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While bullying in the healthcare workplace has been recognized internationally, there is still a culture of silence in many institutions in the United States, perpetuating underreporting and insufficient and unproven interventions. The deliberate, repetitive, and aggressive behaviors of bullying can cause psychological and/or physical harm among professionals, disrupt nursing care, and threaten patient safety and quality outcomes. Much of the literature focuses on categories of bullying behaviors and nurse responses. This qualitative study reports on the experiences of nurses confronting workplace bullying. We collected data from the narratives of 99 nurses who completed an open-ended question embedded in an online survey in 2007. A constructivist grounded theory approach was used to analyze the data and shape a theory of how nurses make things right when confronted with bullying. In a four-step process, nurses place bullying in context, assess the situation, take action, and judge the outcomes of their actions. While many nurses do engage in a number of effective yet untested strategies, two additional concerns remain: inadequate support among nursing colleagues and silence and inaction by nurse administrators. Qualitative inquiry has the potential to guide researchers to a greater understanding of the complexities of bullying in the workplace.

Evidence supporting the psychometric soundness of the instruments identified was limited. Many measures were in early development and additional evaluation is necessary to validate their psychometric properties. A pool of instruments possesses acceptable initial psychometric dependability for selected assessment purposes. These findings have significant implications for assessing youth bullying and designing and evaluating school-based interventions.