Week 4 Discussion 1 Initial Reply Reflect on times when you have seen leadership address conflict in practice. In your initial discussion post for this week, describe one of the times you witnessed conflict in practice. (Withhold the way in which this conflict was managed or resolved as you will be sharing this in your final post -see below.) The history of surgery teems with stories of annoyed and demanding attending surgeons who abused any person who, because of physical proximity, became the object of their fury. Many of us find enjoyment in retelling these anecdotes after we have escaped to the proportional safety of rank or distance but only after we passed the ring of fire and escaped injury. In the operating room, the abusive outbursts of the surgeons are commonly directed at the scrub nurse or Surgical Technologist who is expected to stand mute and take it (Jacobs & Wille, 2012). I have many years of stories of these such happenings… My story reflects this very thing when I was a Team Leader Surgical Technologist for Orthopedic surgery at a local teaching hospital. Team Leaders know about the particular services (types of surgeries) and were considered experts who helped call for special equipment and instrumentation needed and also talked with the surgeons about the items we had to have for every surgery. This day, I was tasked with precepting a new employee (Team Leaders also do this) who was not new to surgery they were new to our department. I was asked to take my lunch while we were waiting for a surgeon to arrive, he was running late as he normally does on this particular day of the week. This particular orthopedic surgeon has a reputation of not liking new people in his surgeries. I knew this lady could hold her own, I told her all I could, (she was not new to the OR she was just new to us). I talked to her about all his quirks and what he likes and then proceeded to go on my lunch break. On my way back from lunch I went back to check on this seasoned Surgical Technologist and I was notified that I was barred for a week from working with this particular orthopedic surgeon. The reason the management gave me was there was someone he did not know or recognize in his surgical case… Tina Reference Jacobs, G. B., & Wille, R. L. (2012). Consequences and potential problems of operating room outbursts and temper tantrums by surgeons. Surgical neurology international, 3(Suppl 3), S167– S173. https://doi.org/10.4103/2152-7806.98577 https://www.science.gov/topicpages/o/operating+room+nursing# https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4173201/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3422097/ Epstein N. E. (2014). Multidisciplinary in-hospital teams improve patient outcomes: A review. Surgical neurology international, 5(Suppl 7), S295–S303. https://doi.org/10.4103/2152-7806.139612
