By Kim Se-jeong
A nurse’s suicide last week is shedding light on prevalent bullying by senior staff nurses against their juniors in hospitals.
Dubbed “taewoom” meaning “burning” in Korean, bullying is a long “tradition” in the nursing community which new nurses deplore. Yet, rooting it out has been problematic _ nurses say the bigger the hospital is, the worse the situation is.
Last Thursday, police found the body of a young female nurse from Asan Medical Center, one of the most prestigious hospitals in the country, outside an apartment complex in eastern Seoul in an apparent suicide.
She didn’t leave any messages but interviews with friends and family led the police to believe that the victim took her own life due to enormous stress from her job. Police said she was working in the intensive care unit and two days before the incident was harshly reprimanded after misplacing an abdominal drainage tube. They are continuing their investigation.
The victim’s boyfriend claimed the issue was much more serious, as six months into her job she was being constantly bullied by a senior colleague, and that must have led her to kill herself. New nurses are usually assigned to senior nurses and get one-on-one training where most of the bullying occurs.
The claim by the boyfriend was taken up instantly on the internet by other nurses who shared similar experiences.
Many wrote that the bullying was so old and commonplace that newcomers had to take it for granted. One nurse wrote that bullying was considered a ritual that every new nurse has to endure.
Bullying is also reflected in the high turnover rates among young nurses.
According to the Korean Nurses Association (KNA), in 2015, 33.9 percent of young nurses left their jobs within a year, presumably due to bullying and high stress.
On Tuesday, the KNA also said nurses often suffer human rights violations at work. According to its survey results, 69.5 percent of nurses answered they had experienced such violations. Almost 41 percent answered they were harassed, both verbally and physically, by colleagues and 18.9 percent said they suffered sexual harassment.
Nurse Han Hye-won from Gyeonggi Province, who started her nursing career in 2007 at a medical center in Suwon, south of Seoul, remembered her bullying experience as demoralizing.
“You could be nice when you teach something to your young colleague or when she makes a mistake,” Han said. “But, my mentor made a big deal out of my mistakes and was mean in her tone when she talked to me. She called me stupid to my face. I knew I had to accept it but was wondering why I had to be so harassed like that by my mentor who was in the end just another colleague.”
Han said it wasn’t just her mistakes to which her mentor reacted hysterically. “She picked on my southern accent and told me to change it because it bothered her a lot. This culture must be completely eradicated.”