Nurses' Perception of Antecedents to Interprofessional Conflicts Among Health Professionals in a Nigerian Teaching Hospital

Monday, 18 November 2019: 2:45 PM

Joel Adeleke Afolayan, PhD
Olayinka Abolore Onasoga, PhD
Fatima Abubakar, SN
DEPARTMENT OF NURSING SCIENCES, University of Ilorin, Ilorin, Nigeria, ILORIN, KWARA STATE, NIGERIA, Nigeria

Introduction: The inter-professional nature of health care team makes members of the team prone to conflicts. This study was designed to examine nurses’ perception of antecedents to inter-professional conflicts in University of Ilorin Teaching Hospital (UITH), Kwara State. The study’s objectives were to examine nurses’ perception on the causes of inter-professional conflict, determine nurses’ perception on the impacts of conflicts in health care delivery and identify perceived ways of resolving inter-professional conflicts in UITH.

Body: Simple random probability sampling technique was used to select 250 nurses working in UITH and self-administered questionnaires were distributed to collect data with 92% response rate. Descriptive and inferential statistics were used to analyse data collected and were presented in tables and figures.

Results of the study revealed that majority of the respondents were women (98.3%), of Yoruba tribe (83%), and married (82.2%). More than half of them were Christians (52.2%) and middle aged (53%) with the leading years of working experience being 21-29years (28.3%). Based on the results, the major perceived antecedents to inter-professional conflicts were wrongful accusation (85.7%), work overload (76.5%) and stressful environment (69.1%). The greatest perceived impacts of conflict on health care delivery were loss of commitment to work (70.4%), reduced productivity (69.6%) and negative emotions; frustration and anger (69.2%). Also the respondents feel that the best way to resolve conflict is by working together to achieve each other’s goals (94.8%).

The study also showed a significant relationship in the year of working experience of respondents and their perception of antecedents to inter-professional conflicts.

Conclusion: A better understanding of self as nurses will go a long way to prevent interprofessional conflicts within the profession and harmonious working relationship will aid therapeutic environment of the nurses and if more nurses are employed to reduce workload interprofessional conflicts will be reduced as workplace stress will also reduce.

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