Conflict management in bulgarian nursing practice – an empirical study results

Abstract

Introduction:The Bulgarian health care system has been in dynamic transition for twenty years by now. The contemporary stage is developing in difficult economical, social and political circumstances. The Bulgarian health care system suffers from extremely low number of nurses. This context predisposes difficult everyday ethical and organizational conflicts that involve nurses. Purpose: to discover and analyze some of the most often and difficult conflicts and their management in Bulgarian medical practice especially in nursing health care based on opinion of nurses. Tasks: 1. To identify, classify and analyze the conflicts with stressing the ethical aspects. 2. The applied methods of managing conflicts to be described and to discuss the most preferred strategies of solving conflicts. Methods: Content analysis of written cases has been performed. The cases are prepared by students in Nursing Health Care Management at the Medical Faculty of Trakia University -Stara Zagora and describe real conflicts in their professional experience. Ethical conflicts and complex ones that include ethical component are identified and investigated. Qualitative criteria are applied for defining the type, sources, stage, methods and strategy for managing conflict. Results: Most of the conflicts are not clearly ethical but complex and are caused by ineffective communication. The insufficient time for conversations with patients leads to mistakes and interpersonal conflicts. The team conflicts most often are connected with unclear professional roles and mutual dependant responsibilities and sometimes underestimation of nurses by physicians. For solving conflicts usually the authors of cases combine well known methods with innovative ones. Compromise and cooperation are the most preferred models. Our analysis shows that in the most cases the strategies of solving conflicts are unaggressive, non-competitive and creative. Conclusions: The issue of conflict management is a big challenge to Bulgarian nurses managers. It requires theoretical knowledge, adequate managerial skills and ethical attitude to perform the delicate activity of solving conflicts. Certain political decisions must be taken as well in the direction of reducing the sources of conflicts by the managers on strategic level.