Bullying in Nursing Is Getting Worse. Renee Thompson Says Silence Is Not a Strategy.

Nurses are known for compassion. So why is it so hard to show that same compassion to each other?

That question sits at the center of the latest episode of the Love n’ Leary Nursing Podcast. Hosts Marion Leary, PhD, MPH, RN, and Rebecca Love, RN, MSN, FIEL, sat down with Renee Thompson, DNP, RN, FAONL, FAAN, CSP, the CEO and founder of the Healthy Workforce Institute. Thompson has spent 16 years working to end bullying and incivility in healthcare. Her answer is blunt: things are not getting better. They are getting worse.

>>Listen to The Way We Treat Each Other Should Be Just as Important as the Care We Provide: Bullying and Incivility in Healthcare (with Renee Thompson, DNP, RN, FAONL, FAAN, CSP)

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Thompson has been a nurse for more than 30 years. She worked at the bedside, in home care, in education, and as a frontline manager. Later, she led professional development for about 10,000 nurses at a large health system.

Everywhere she went, nurses told her the same thing. The hardest part of the job wasn’t the work. It was how other nurses treated them.

“Working in healthcare is hard enough without worrying about your coworkers making it harder.”

So she quit a job she loved and started a company to do something about it. Sixteen years later, the Healthy Workforce Institute equips leaders and teams across healthcare (not just nurses) to address bullying and incivility head-on.

Thompson points to research that backs up what nurses feel every shift. A 2025 AONL Joslin Insight study found incivility is the top factor harming nurse leaders’ sense of psychological safety. And SHRM research puts the cost of incivility across all industries at about $2 billion a day in lost productivity and absenteeism.

She also pushes back on a common hope: that things improved after the pandemic. They didn’t.

“People have just gotten used to it being okay that we treat each other with cruelty.”

Eating Our Young (and Our Old)

The phrase “nurses eat their young” has been around for decades. Thompson says new nurses are still the most vulnerable. But there’s a newer pattern too: younger nurses targeting experienced ones.

Marion offered another way to see it. Newer nurses may simply be more confident and more direct. What one generation reads as honesty, another may read as disrespect. Thompson agreed it’s both, and said the fix is the same either way. It starts with intent. Experienced nurses can invite new nurses to share the latest evidence. New nurses can ask experienced nurses to share what school never taught them.

Thompson no longer accepts one-time speaking gigs meant to “solve” a culture problem. A single workshop can’t do that. What works, she says, is a system:

• Equip leaders. Many stay silent because they don’t know what to say or fear retaliation. Silence is not a strategy.
• Involve the whole team. Set behavioral expectations together, including physicians and other staff, and build a shared compact for how people treat each other.
• Keep it on the agenda. Her number one tip: make “healthy workforce” a standing item at every meeting. It gives teams permission to talk about behavior, not just operations.
• Teach the skills. A compact on paper means nothing if people were never taught how to give and receive feedback.

Thompson lays all of this out in the second edition of her book, Enough! Eradicate Bullying & Incivility in Healthcare: Strategies for Front Line Leaders, updated for a post-pandemic workforce.

Thompson closed with a challenge. Every bullying incident has three parties: the person doing the bullying, the target, and the witness. The witness holds the most power.

“If you see that something is happening… say something.”

Say something to the person behaving badly. Or to the target… even a simple text: “I saw what happened. That’s not okay. Are you okay?” Or to someone in authority. The point is to stop letting silence do the talking.

As Marion put it, it shouldn’t be this hard. Be kind. Healthcare is hard enough already.

Listen to the full conversation on the Love n’ Leary Nursing Podcast at https://nurse.org/lovenleary, or wherever you get your podcasts.

🤔 Have you ever witnessed bullying or incivility at work? What made it easier, or harder, to speak up? Tell us in the comments below.