Reporting peer wrongdoing in the healthcare profession: the role of incompetence and substance abuse information

This article reports an analysis of the thinking processes nurses use when making decisions to report peer wrongdoing. Nurses (N=120) were asked to provide subjective probability estimates of the likelihood that they would report a hypothetical coworker for substance abuse and/or incompetence related to practice. Data were analyzed using formal inference-based recursive modeling (FIRM). Findings confirm that when considering workplace wrongdoing, nurses view working under the influence of any type of substance to be a very serious offense. More interesting, nurses combined incompetence and substance-abuse cues in complex ways, possibly due to the critical-thinking skills acquired during their education and practice.