Resolving Conflicts in a Health Care Setting

Resolving Conflict in a Healthcare Setting

The purpose of this paper is to provide a summary of a real-life conflict in a healthcare setting, including the cause of the conflict, the parties that were involved, how the conflict was resolved, and whether the outcome was fair to all the individuals who were involved. In addition, an explanation concerning how the conflict could have been avoided from the outset is followed by a description of the associated DNP essentials and which leadership competencies were applied and how they served to accomplish the outcome. Finally, the paper provides a summary of the findings in the conclusion.

Real-life example of conflict

Several years ago, a program specialist in the office of quality assurance (OOQA) in a tertiary healthcare facility was tasked with trending all patient incidents by her supervisor to identify trends and opportunities for improvement in the delivery of patient care. These reports were to be disseminated to all medical center services for review during the month quality assurance meetings to determine if their service was affected or otherwise played a role pursuant to Joint Commission requirements. The program specialist collected patient incident data for the previous year to establish benchmarks and trended all of the patient incident reports by incident type, time of day, location and so forth.

After distributing the first year of patient incident data to all services, the program specialist realized that the nursing ward- and shift-specific data were skewed because the data was not weighted by the number of patient-days of care that were involved. In other words, a ward that experienced 10 medication errors in a month caring for 1,000 patients had a much lower rate compared to a ward that had five medication errors but only cared for 10 patients (an extreme example but illustrative of the flaw) (Determining Patient Days for Summary Data Collection, 2022). On her own initiative, the program specialist obtained the patient-days of are data for the previous year and arranged for this data to be provided her on a monthly basis in the future for inclusion in the quality assurance reports without informing her supervisor of this addition.

Following the distribution of the succeeding month’s QA reports containing the new patient-days of care weighted data, the program specialist was called into her supervisor’s office and grilled as to why this new information was included in the reports. After explaining the above-described rationale, her supervisor responded by saying that she did not like the new data included and directed the program specialist to discontinue its use without explaining her reasoning. The program specialist brought her concerns to the director of OOQA, a DNR who was responsible for the overall patient incident reporting program.

After learning the details of the conflict and interviewing the program specialist’s supervisor, it was determined that the reason for discontinuance of the patient-days of care data was the fact hat the supervisor was best friends with one of the chief nurses on a shift and ward that had the worst record for medication errors in the medical center using this approach and she wanted to avoid embarrassing her or otherwise haring her career. This conflict could have been avoided from the outset if the program specialist had sought approval before including the patient-days of care data and if her supervisor had been honest and forthcoming about the real reasons for her objections to its inclusion. The DNR instructed the program specialist to continue using patient-days of care and commended her for her initiative and disciplined the supervisor for her duplicity and abuse of power.

Define how the applicable DNP essentials were explored or associated with the weekly discussion topic.

The DNR applied the DNP essentials of “identifying systems’ issues” and demonstrating proficiency in “quality improvement strategies and in creating and sustaining changes at the organizational and policy levels” (Essential II) as well as the ability to integrate “knowledge from diverse sources” (Essential III).