Authors' objectives: Unprofessional behaviour in healthcare systems can negatively impact staff well-being, patient safety and organisational costs. Unprofessional behaviour encompasses a range of behaviours, including incivility, microaggressions, harassment and bullying. Despite efforts to combat unprofessional behaviour in healthcare settings, it remains prevalent. Interventions to reduce unprofessional behaviour in health care have been conducted – but how and why they may work is unclear. Given the complexity of the issue, a realist review methodology is an ideal approach to examining unprofessional behaviour in healthcare systems. Unprofessional behaviour (UB) in healthcare systems can have significant negative impact on staff well-being, patient safety and organisational costs. UB encompasses a range of behaviours – such as incivility, microaggressions, harassment and bullying – that remain prevalent in healthcare systems around the world. In 2022, Workforce Race Equality Standard data indicated that the percentage of staff experiencing UB from colleagues in the National Health Service (NHS) was 22.5% for white respondents and 27.6% for ethnic minority respondents. Unprofessional behaviour can impact negatively on the psychological well-being of both targets and witnesses. This may result in higher rates of staff sick leave and turnover. Conservative estimates suggest that damages from bullying alone cost the NHS approximately £2.28 billion per annum. The negative impacts of UB also extend to patient safety, which can be compromised if staff members who are victims of UB are unable to speak up – leading to medical errors and poor patient outcomes. Managing, mitigating and preventing UB can assist in addressing the increasing workforce crisis in health care and declining rates of patient satisfaction, as well as improve patient outcomes. Extant literature has focused predominantly on bullying. Literature exploring the implementation and effectiveness of interventions designed to reduce UB is often underpinned by the belief that the more people know about UB – including how to recognise and challenge it – the more likely it is to be reduced. However, this is very challenging to do and places the responsibility on individuals. Interventions to reduce UB in health care may need to be tailored to specific contexts and may need to go beyond increasing awareness and assertiveness to address deeper systemic issues. This is a complex, widespread and urgent issue that is heavily reliant on context and has negative impact on staff well-being, patient safety and organisational costs. A realist review methodology may be an ideal method for examining the interacting components of UB between staff in acute healthcare settings. This review aimed to: Conceptualise and refine terminology, by mapping behaviours defined as unprofessional to understand differences and similarities between terms referring to UB (e.g. incivility, bullying, microaggressions) and how these terms are used by different professional groups in acute healthcare settings. Develop and refine context, mechanism and outcome configurations (CMOCs), to understand the causes and contexts of UB, the mechanisms that trigger different behaviours, and the outcomes on staff, patients and the wider system of health care. Identify strategies designed to mitigate, manage and prevent UB and explore how, why and in what circumstances these work and whom they benefit. Produce recommendations and comprehensive resources that support the tailoring, UB and their impacts.

Authors' results and conclusions: Initial theory-building drew on 38 sources. Searches resulted in 2878 titles and abstracts. In total, 148 sources were included in the review. Terminology and definitions used for unprofessional behaviours were inconsistent. This may present issues for policy and practice when trying to identify and address unprofessional behaviour. Contributors of unprofessional behaviour can be categorised into four areas: (1) workplace disempowerment, (2) organisational uncertainty, confusion and stress, (3) (lack of) social cohesion and (4) enablement of harmful cultures that tolerate unprofessional behaviours. Those at most risk of experiencing unprofessional behaviour are staff from a minoritised background. We identified 42 interventions in the literature to address unprofessional behaviour. These spanned five types: (1) single session (i.e. one-off), (2) multiple sessions, (3) single or multiple sessions combined with other actions (e.g. training session plus a code of conduct), (4) professional accountability and reporting interventions and (5) structured culture-change interventions. We identified 42 reports of interventions, with none conducted in the United Kingdom. Of these, 29 interventions were evaluated, with the majority (n = 23) reporting some measure of effectiveness. Interventions drew on 13 types of behaviour-change strategy designed to, for example: change social norms, improve awareness of unprofessional behaviour, or redesign the workplace. Interventions were impacted by 12 key dynamics, including focusing on individuals, lack of trust in management and non-existent logic models. Workplace disempowerment and organisational barriers are primary contributors to unprofessional behaviour. However, interventions predominantly focus on individual education or training without addressing systemic, organisational issues. Effectiveness of interventions to improve staff well-being or patient safety is uncertain. We provide 12 key dynamics and 15 implementation principles to guide organisations. Terminology We explored the use of UB-related terminology in the literature and found that forms of UB can be placed on a spectrum according to how specific they were, whether they were visible to the organisation or their targets, and whether they required a hierarchical structure to occur. We also found that there is little agreement within the literature about how to define dimensions of UB. This may cause confusion and make it challenging to synthesise the literature on this topic. In practice, the lack of a shared definition or understanding of UB could lead to difficulties in understanding its prevalence, reduce the likelihood of individuals reporting UB and hinder the effectiveness of interventions to address UB. Unprofessional behaviour is a pervasive issue currently poorly addressed by existing interventions. We identified many contributors to UB, most of which relate to worker disempowerment and organisational barriers. However, most existing interventions do not address these systemic, organisational contributors to UB, instead relying on education or training workshops to boost individual knowledge or awareness, identify problematic individuals or improve UB targets’ ability to speak up. Such approaches may reduce UB prevalence; however, it is unclear whether this has lasting positive impact or improves staff psychological well-being and patient safety. Future interventions would benefit from being designed and tested in UK settings, drawing on contemporary behavioural science principles to help inform their design, and focusing on systemic issues within organisations. We provide 12 key dynamics and 15 implementation principles to guide organisations.

Authors' methods: Realist synthesis methodology consistent with realist and meta-narrative evidence syntheses: evolving standards reporting guidelines. Literature sources for building initial theories were identified from the original proposal and from informal searches of various websites. For theory refinement, we conducted systematic and purposive searches for peer-reviewed literature on databases such as EMBASE, Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature and MEDLINE databases as well as for grey literature. Searches were conducted iteratively from November 2021 to December 2022. This review focuses on interpersonal staff-to-staff unprofessional behaviour, in acute healthcare settings only and does not include non-intervention literature outside the United Kingdom or outside of health care. Realist reviews seek to understand why an intervention may work in one context but not another. This involves building an understanding of how various contextual factors affect the activation of mechanisms (i.e. changes in participant reasoning) to produce various outcomes. Often these relationships are not well articulated in the literature, so realist research draws on retroductive reasoning to unpack this information, drawing on ‘hunches’ as well as inductive and deductive reasoning to ask, ‘why do things appear as they do?’. The aim of this is to build CMOCs that underpin programme theories and to build an understanding of how contributors drive UB and how different strategies may be used in different contexts to address UB. Realist reviews also enable grey literature to be drawn upon. Our review had six main stages: Formulating initial programme theories drawing on informal literature searches of NHS England, The King’s Fund, British Medical Association, Health and Care Professions Council and NHS Employers websites, as well as literature already known to the study team and in the study protocol. This comprised 38 studies after screening for relevancy and rigour. Performing systematic and purposive searches for peer-reviewed literature on EMBASE, Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature and MEDLINE databases as well as grey literature on Health Management Information Consortium, National Institute for Health and Care Excellence Evidence Search, Patient Safety Network, Google and Google Scholar databases, and NHS Employers and NHS Health Education England websites. Searches were conducted in November 2021, then expanded to include United States of America (USA) literature in August 2022 and updated in December 2022. Selecting appropriate documents while considering rigour and relevance. The above searches identified 5967 total titles and abstracts across all databases after deduplication. We applied strict conceptual-richness criteria to include the most relevant and useful literature. Searching and screening in November 2022 resulted in 64 included sources. Additional searching in August 2022 resulted in the addition of 36 sources; the December 2022 search added a further 10 sources. This meant that 110 sources were used for theory refinement (step 2 onwards) while 38 were used in step 1 for initial theory generation, with 148 sources included in total. Extracting data using NVivo 12 software (QSR International, Warrington, UK) using a mix of inductive and deductive code creation. Key excerpts were also extracted separately into a Word document so that patterns across literature could be collated and investigated. Characteristics of included sources were extracted into an Excel spreadsheet. Synthesising data with the aid of the data categorised within NVivo, where data were coded according to UB definitions, contributors, interventions, and strategies. This enabled us to compare and contrast, reconcile, adjudicate and consolidate different sources of evidence to build an understanding of which contexts affect how interventions work, and why and how various UB contributors may work. Refining and testing initial programme theories against additional identified literature. At this stage, CMOCs and programme theories were either confirmed, refuted or added to our step 2 analysis. Stakeholder feedback was also incorporated at five points in the project through the following process: (1) record theory presentation to stakeholders for refinement, (2) record suggested alterations, (3) perform purposive searching to sense-check non-aligned suggestions, (4) discuss discrepancies within the team to determine consensus and action taken and (5) represent changes made to stakeholders/group for further sense-checking. We identified 42 interventions that sought to reduce UB between acute healthcare staff. The majority were developed and implemented in the USA (n = 30), with none reported from the United Kingdom (UK). The interventions included single-session or multiple-session designs, combined with other actions such as codes of conduct, professional accountability and reporting interventions and structured culture-change interventions. However, most interventions did not draw on theoretical frameworks to inform their design, report theoretical underpinnings, provide an understanding of why and how the intervention is expected to work or report any comprehensive long-term evaluation. Only one intervention targeted UB impacting minoritised groups (racism). Of the 29 studies that assessed intervention effectiveness, the majority (n = 23) reported positive results – but this depended on the outcome measures these studies chose. Interventions drawing on single-session designs were reported as less effective compared to multiple-session interventions. There was a trend towards more complex interventions reporting greater effectiveness. Interventions can have degrees of flexibility, allowing for variation as to which components or strategies participants are exposed to. However, this makes them more resource-intensive to implement and harder to evaluate. We also found (via information from our stakeholder group) that there are interventions taking place in practice that are not adequately reported in the literature, making it difficult to assess their effectiveness. Finally, we did not include interventions to improve civility or professionalism alone, which may also address some contributors to UB. The review identified 13 categories of strategies to reduce UB. These strategies included direct or indirect approaches to instigators (such as informal or disciplinary actions), improving awareness and knowledge of UB for all staff, improving teamwork, setting social norms through leadership role-modelling and code of conduct, and reporting and escalation systems. Improving leadership competence and empathy, workplace redesign and changing recruitment and dismissal processes were also identified, as were external pressures on organisations and strategies to aid implementation. Overall, the strategies highlighted the importance of addressing UB from multiple angles and levels (individual, team, organisational and societal), involving all staff and management levels, and creating a culture of respect and accountability.

Project Status: Completed

URL for project: https://www.journalslibrary.nihr.ac.uk/programmes/hsdr/NIHR131606

Year Published: 2024

URL for published report: https://www.journalslibrary.nihr.ac.uk/hsdr/PAMV3758

URL for additional information: English

English language abstract: An English language summary is available

Publication Type: Full HTA

Country: England, United Kingdom

DOI: 10.3310/PAMV3758

Organisation Name: NIHR Health Services and Delivery Research programme

Contact Address: NIHR Journals Library, National Institute for Health and Care Research, Evaluation, Trials and Studies Coordinating Centre, Alpha House, University of Southampton Science Park, Southampton SO16 7NS, UK

Contact Name: journals.library@nihr.ac.uk

Contact Email: journals.library@nihr.ac.uk