Question

• Describe an interpersonal conflict you have seen in your nursing workplace.
• Describe how this conflict was solved, and by whom.
• Discuss approaches that you would use to increase the effectiveness of this kind of conflict’s resolution.

Answer 1

An interpersonal conflict occurred between my colleague and her patient's bystander. The issue was the client and her bystander said that the nurse didn't administered a dose of antibiotic to the patient.

It was a dose of antibiotic to be administered early morning at 4 am. The nurse strongly said that she had administered that dose to the patient. But the client as well as her bystander disageed it and it created a big conflict between them. The bystander said that he was awake at 4am and there were no nurses in that room and no medication administration was done at that time.

This was the conflict occurred in the workplace.

How the conflict was solved and by whom

This issue become worse and the nurse manager as well as the human resource manager came to the floor and told everyone to clear the floor and they called that nurse and the patient along with her bystander to a room.

Both the nurse manager and the human resource manager sit together and discussed the issue with the client as well as with the nurse.

The nurse was sure that she had administered that dose of IV ( Intravenous ) antibiotic to that patient. But the patient and her bystander strongly disagreed it.

Finally, the nurse manager asked the bystander to bring all the remaining antibiotic medications from the bedside locker and started to count it. After finishing the counting she came to know that an extra dose of antibiotic is still remaining in it and it was not actually administered.

She took the client's file and noted that a signature was put in the place of that medication. Thus it was clear that the nurse didn't administered the medication and without administering she had signed it.

As this was a kind of negligence from the side the nurse, the nurse manager warned her and told her to write the incident report. Finally the issue was resolved by compromising.

Approaches to increase conflict resolution

There are mainly 5 strategies for conflict resolution,

1. Avoiding - this is by ignoring the conflict scenario and hoping that it will resolve itself.
2. Compromising - this is by mutually accepting the issue and satisfying both the conflict making parties while maintaining cooperativeness and assertiveness.
3. Accommodating - this is by allowing the opposite person's needs before yours. That is by simply allowing them to 'win'.
4. Competing - this is by competing between the opposition party and not allowing them to win as you consider your part is right.
5. Collaborating - this is by satisfying both parties by a "win-win" approach. Both conflict making parties believe that they won the conflict.

Note: There are many issues or conflicts occur as a part of our job. It can be resolved when we approach the proper channels to resolve them.