Staff v. Patients: The Phenomenon of Rejection

Abstract

All staff (n = 27) of one clinical team in a psychiatric rehabilitation hospital answered a special questionnaire designed to elicit their personal feelings about all their 110 patients. Interpersonal preferences and antipathies emerged, together with much individual ambivalence and inter-staff agreement and disagreement. Attention was focussed on the phenomenon of rejection of patients by staff, with the following results: 1. Rejection by a group of staff is a matter of degree rather than an all or none phenomenon. 2. From the way that staff opinions can be used to arrange a group of patients in a rank order of (preference or) rejection, it appears that there is bound to be a sub-group of rejected patients at the lower end of this order, determined more by relative than absolute criteria. 3. Some personality differences are described which were found between the two sub-groups of nurses who were respectively more and less prone to accept. None of the 25 nurses in the sample was more prone to reject than to accept patients. 4. The type of patient behaviour that leads to rejection is described. 5. Twenty of the 110 patients were considered to be rejected. As a group these 20 patients were significantly more given to socially embarrassing behaviour, less hard-working and more heavily medicated. 6. There is a statistically significant tendency for staff of either sex to reject patients of the same sex more readily than those of the opposite sex.