Our attitude impacts patients. Some disagree, but most know work goes easier with a great attitude. Do we agree on what defines a good attitude versus a bad one? Who determines attitude? What influences it? Can we measure it?
The business literature dwarfs medical writing on attitude. Here are a few blog posts:
- Why your attitude is everything in business.
- Success is all in the attitude for entrepreneurs.
- Your business attitude is a choice. Optimists outperform pessimists by 50%
- Attitude reflects character.
Healthcare literature discusses it mostly as bias or perspective versus inclination or temper:
- A positive attitude: make it the rule not the exception .
- Physician attitude towards work impacts satisfaction.
- Doctor-centric, paternalistic attitudes in senior medical students
- “A good nurse has the right attitude” (NurseTogether.com)
- Attitudes towards patients with back pain, older patients , ethical principles.
We know the pain of working with someone foul. We also know how our own outlook impacts work. Great attitude makes every situation better. It calms chaos, turns around patient outcomes and transforms great into excellence.
Good attitude
- Positive
- Enthusiastic
- Realistic
- Solution-oriented
- Respectful
- Forgiving
- Humble
- Flexible
- Industrious
- Kind
- Gentle
- Confident without needing applause
- Deferent
- Magnanimous
Toxic attitude
- Negative
- Scoffing
- Sneering
- Disdainful
- Ignoring
- Angry
- Petulant
- Derisive
- Proud
- Arrogant
- Suspicious
- Critical
- Doubtful
Dozens of things impact attitude: life experience, upbringing, personality, health, social support, faith, … But attitude remains a choice (see Eat THAT Cookie!: Make Workplace Positivity Pay Off…For Individuals, Teams, and Organizations
Folks are usually about as happy as they make up their minds to be – Abraham Lincoln
Instead of choosing our perspective, we tend to let others shape us. Outside sources teach us or model how to think and feel:
- Media, and others, tell us patients abuse the system for minor complaints.
- Unions remind us of how bad we have it and rouse fights-rights-marches and victimhood.
- Associations can model “no one else knows what they are doing”.
- Colleges portray rigidity, authoritarian proclamations and black and white thinking.
- Coroners were taught to be circumspect, suspicious and to ‘think dirty’.
- Professional schools (MD and RN) can promote entitlement, elitism and professional hubris.
Excuses:
“Well, if you had to work as hard as I do, with the bosses I have, you’d have a bad attitude too!”
We come up with great reasons for how we earned our right to be sour. However, not everyone is vile despite the same ‘great reasons’. Many people with better reasons to be miserable are not. Our list of ‘great reason’ are just excuses.
- I work too hard; no one works as hard as me.
- Leadership/colleagues/government/culture oppresses me.
- I have righteous anger over lack of quality.
- I have a really hard job.
- My patients are tough/high needs/demanding.
- My pay is too low; I deserve better.
- No one listens.
- I see terrible things/death/pain/suffering.
- I have to make impossible choices at work.
- I wrestle with life and death every day; faced with my own mortality.
- I live with continual anxiety over my own incompetence/imperfection/frailty.
- My deep concern/compassion for patients makes me angry.
- I’m frustrated at the lack of perfection/improvement/solutions.
Attitude matters. It’s a choice. Bad attitude ruins patient experience even if we deliver great technological outcomes.
If we agree that attitude impacts performance, why don’t we address it? Can we measure it? Shouldn’t it be a core element of performance management? We measure and post time based metrics; would we ever measure and post attitude scores?
(photo credit: judiciaryreport.com)
) then apply lists to everything. They find protocols improve outcomes and decide every patient needs the same treatment for diagnosis, all the time. It appeals to pundits in love with tick-boxes, check-lists and airline analogies.