Investigation of bullying behaviors in clinical settings from the nursing students’ views

Bullying is a form of interpersonal aggressive behavior that may lead to alarming growth . Nursing students entering clinical practice are at risk of injury and bullying, which can have unpleasant consequences. This study endeavored to identify the frequency, type, source of bullying, method of report, and the undesirable effect of bullying on students.

This descriptive study was performed on 193 of third and fourth year nursing students of Medical Sciences Universities of Yazd, Iran, who experienced the clinical setting. Sampling was done through stratified random sampling. Data collection instruments were questionnaires of demographic characteristics and Clark et al.chr('39')s bullying behaviors. Data were analyzed both descriptively and inferentially.

According to the findings, 61.85% (n=118) of the participants experienced bullying, of which 32% (n=769) were bullied by the clinical instructor and 24.8% (n=597) by the nurse and 16.72% (n = 402) by the patient and family. The most bullying behaviors (15.93%, n = 383) were frozen out, ignored and excluded. 10.9% (n=21) decided to leave the field due to bullying. 67.9% (n=131) did not report bullying behavior, of which 36.8% (n=55) expressed that the reason was fear of poor evaluation.

The results indicated that more than half of nursing students are exposed to a variety of bullying behaviors that are often performed by a clinical instructor and are not reported for fear of poor evaluation which can be a factor of intentions to leave the nursing program. Therefore, clinical educational authorities should teach nursing students some ways to prevent bullying and how to react to such behaviors and appropriate measures should be taken into account to improve clinical learning contexts.