Clinicians may unknowingly lower the quality of care after a pediatric patient’s parents are rude, according to a recent study.
“Rudeness has robust, deleterious effects on the performance of medical teams,” the authors concluded.
Researchers studied 39 teams of clinicians who worked in a neonatal ICU, conducting simulations that included the care of both full-term and newborn babies.
One group of clinicians were exposed to rudeness in the form of a mother criticizing the overall quality of the facility, saying they should have taken the baby to another hospital where they would receive better care. The mother did not directly criticize the clinicians working with her child.
The other group had parents who made neutral comments during their child’s care.
Another two teams of clinicians were exposed to the rude parent, but one had undergone a preventive mode of therapy called cognitive bias modification, which addresses how people may unconsciously focus on the positive or negative of interactions.
That therapy was provided before the exposure to the rude parent. The other group underwent post-exposure narrative therapy, in which the counselor encourages the person to discuss the event and find skill sets to address problems.
Two independent judges evaluated each team’s performance with a questionnaire. The researchers found that clinicians exposed to rudeness performed worse on diagnostic and intervention measures. Teamwork also was adversely affected.
The effects of the two therapy options varied significantly. Cognitive bias modification successfully mitigated the negative effects of the rudeness in almost every instance, but the narrative therapy after the event had no significant effect, the researchers said.
(An abstract of the study is available online at
http://bit.ly/2ismJHf.)
