Article
Exploring causes, consequences, and management of healthcare conflicts
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Published: | September 5, 2016 |
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Outline
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Objective: In healthcare, conflicts between providers can affect teams, working environment, and patient care. We sought to explore sources of conflicts among healthcare providers, and to analyze how providers were affected by and responded to conflicts.
Methods: Eighty randomly-selected physicians, nurses, and nursing auxiliaries working across four departments (internal medicine, community medicine, pediatrics and surgical units) were interviewed about their experiences with intra- and/or interprofessional conflicts. To answer our research questions, we performed a content analysis on interview transcripts.
Results: In our preliminary analysis, we identified five broad causes of conflicts: relationships, tasks, team processes, structural processes, and social representations and group identity. Consequences of conflicts included personal and professional impacts on healthcare providers (e.g. changing specialty), and potential decrease in quality of teamwork and patient care. Such consequences could also generate working conditions where errors were more likely to occur. Responses to conflicts varied depending on past personal experiences and availability of support for conflict management for providers and their supervisors.
Discussion: Our research identifies the main causes of conflicts among healthcare providers, and shows how these conflicts affect providers’ personal and professional development, their work, and quality of patient care. Future analysis of our data will focus on comparing causes and consequences of conflicts in different clinical settings. We will also seek to identify areas where educational programs may enable healthcare providers to develop better conflict awareness and conflict management skills.
Take-home messages: Healthcare conflicts have multiple causes, and can have wide-ranging impacts on healthcare professionals, their work and collaboration with other providers, and on patient care.