UF research links rudeness with declining quality of care

A UF researcher has found that when you treat your child’s doctor rudely, quality of care plummets.

Amir Erez, a UF management professor, helped conduct the study in Tel Aviv, Israel. He found that being rude to doctors affected their performance throughout the day, even after they moved on to a different case. While chronic lack of sleep accounts for 10 to 20 percent of practitioners’ decreased performance, rudeness was found to account for more than 40 percent, Erez said.

When he first heard about the correlation between rudeness and doctors’ performance from University of Southern California assistant professor Christine Porath, Erez said he couldn’t believe her research. He said he thought people could easily get over insults, especially if they had to.

“I found very quickly that she was right, and I was wrong,” he said. “Rudeness has a tremendous effect.”

Rudeness affects people’s cognitive system, where planning and goal management is controlled, Erez said. He said he also wanted to see how rudeness affects doctors. He had 39 teams, comprised of two doctors and two nurses each, diagnose and treat mannequins at a simulation center in Tel Aviv while an expert doctor or nurse looked on.

Actors posed as the mannequins’ “mothers” and were purposefully rude to some team members.

“It didn’t only affect the case where the ‘mother’ was insulting with them, it actually stayed with them the entire day,” Erez said.

If an expert or authority figure insulted the medical team, they were unable to resuscitate the mannequins properly or locate and diagnose diseases, he said.

Anja Glassmer, a bedside nurse at Miami Children’s Health System, said after 26 years in her profession, she can deal with rude patients and parents. Parents are often overwhelmed when faced with what their children are diagnosed with, Glassmer said.

She said she handles ruder clients by calmly explaining the treatment plan to them.

“I know from other nurses in my unit, especially young ones that don’t know how to deal with stressors, it affects them,” she said. “For me, myself, I can brush it off.”

During the study, Erez attempted two interventions before the rude incident and after it. Before the medical team was confronted with rudeness, some completed a computer game based on cognitive behavioral therapy to help them notice signs of aggression before they occurred, he said. Other test subjects wrote about their experience afterward from the aggressor’s perspective.

The medical team handled the rude behavior and treated their patients better when they went through the cognitive behavioral therapy, Erez said.

“The thing to do about it is to be aware of it,” he said.