How rude parents affect hospital staff
Doing this has a bigger impact than you think.
By Livia Gamble
February 28 2017
Having a sick child is stressful for any parent, but a recent study found how you treat medical staff has a negative impact on how they treat your child.
A new Israeli study, published in the journal Pediatrics found rudeness impacts a medical team’s ability to do their job.
“We weren’t looking at angry parents, we were looking at rude parents,” Dr Peter Bamberger, a study co-author and the associate dean for research at Coller School of Management at Tel Aviv University, told the New York Times.
Researchers simulated a crisis scenario similar to what medical staff would use to practice, using actors and fake babies. During this time, a rude mother would say something like: “I knew we should have gone to a better hospital where they don’t practice Third World medicine.”
Though the mother wasn't aggressive, it turns out, rudeness has more of an impact.
“It wasn’t anything horrible,” Dr Bamberger said. “They weren’t going ballistic, they weren’t violent. They just said things that weren’t so pleasant for doctors to hear.”
And as a result, the whole team is affected.
Lead author of the study, Dr Arieh Riskin said: “At the level of the team, it really hampers all the function.”
“All the collaborative mechanisms and things that make a team a team, rather than four individuals working separately, were damaged by the exposure to rudeness.”
This article was originally published by New Idea.
