Fight Between Two Staff Nurses

As I spend more hours at the leadership, I am able to get the application aspect of my lecture down. June 23, 2011 was the day that I started my roll out for my change project. Something unusual that I witnessed during my day was a fight between two staff nurses. The conflict between them has been going on for a couple of days and escalated that morning. The fight became intense with violent verbal comments being thrown at each other. Conflict resolution is difficult process, consuming time and energy. An effective leader achieves a balance between transformational and transactional behaviors. I watched my preceptor dissolve the issue in an excellent way. She made sure she protected each party's self-respect. She allowed open discussion of the problem from each participant. One thing that she did was asking each person summarize what the comments of the other prior to starting her own. She helped each nurse develop alternative solutions, select a mutually agreeable one, develop a plan to carry it out. At the end of the conflict resolution session, each nurse cooperated in the resolution and felt better.

The next important event of the day was my roll out process. My change project involves making an admission/ transfer/ discharge checklist tool for the ICU nurses. This tool is meant to ensure that these process and requirement I had an unusual day which definitely correlates with the learning from class (resistance to change). As I learnt during my didactic class, resistance to change is to be expected by nurses during change. According to Sullivan et al, it could be due to number of reasons such as lack of trust, vested interest in the status quo, fear of failure, loss of status or income, misunderstanding, and belief that change is unnecessary or that will not improve the situation. During my roll-out/in-service training, I encountered the different kinds of response to change. I had the innovators who were definitely down for the change. Statements like "Finally", "That sounds like a better way to keep track"