Toxic Nursing, Second Edition

Today’s nurse managers—tasked with a wide array of responsibilities from staffing and budgeting to promoting safe and effective patient care—face unprecedented demands in their role as leaders of the largest healthcare workforce in the industry. They must be clinically competent, relationally savvy, and administratively gifted—and find the time to create and sustain a healthy work environment. In addition to those demands, the lopsided aging of the population has had a double impact: More nurses are retiring from the profession at the same time as elderly baby boomers require increasingly complex and costly care. As nursing workforce retirements increase, a continued push for effective leadership will be critical to healthcare outcomes in the coming decades. As workforce shortages continue, it will be critical to educate managers who can advocate for, support, and empower staff. Healthcare organizations have a duty to provide nurse managers with the tools and support needed to manage effectively. Toxic Nursing is an integral part of that education.

Each chapter begins with an overview of particular areas where nurse toxicity often arises. Following that is a section titled “Clearing Toxicity: Scenarios, Insights, and Reflections.” Here there are scenarios based on real-life accounts, with insight and advice from nurse leaders—a group of 31 experts in nursing management who were asked to respond to the narratives from the perspective of preventing, ad­dressing, or minimizing the consequences of conflict. Experts were asked to avoid citing references and rely on their own experiences and intuitive skills to provide practical advice about the situation. Following the “Nurse Leader Insight” section are “Reflections” with prompts to help readers explore the issues presented.

At the end of each chapter is a section called “Fostering Cultural Change” that can help guide you as you explore with your staff methods to decrease toxicity and promote a healthier and more satisfying work environment. Toxic Nursing, Second Edition helps nurses—from bedside nurses to charge nurses to nurse managers—navigate the nuances and gray areas of toxic behavior.