Workplace Dilemna

There are many professional workplace dilemmas that I can write about and that's what has made this paper a little difficult to start. I use to be employed at a company called Diamond Ridge Health Rehabilitation Center (DRHRC) in the Nursing Department. This alone opens up many opportunities for ethical issues to arise. The one that I can remember the most about has to do with alleged sexual harassment by a co-worker. The whole scenario is one that we as employees will remember for a long time and for the ones that were supervisors definitely had a learning experience.

The person involved was a staff therapist in his 50's whom had been at DRHRC for over 20 years at the time. He also taught at Life Support Education, we as fellow staff loved him as he always helped us get through ACLS, PALS and NRP. We all thought of him as just a goofy good old boy from Brentwood who sometimes would say things that we just blew off. Well all that changed with the new harassment free workplace laws. He used to say things like "if you don't pass this I will spank you" and we just laughed. Then the new generation came to work. And one young girl was in PALS and he said his usual. Well the usual joking didn't set well with her and so it began. The first thing we noticed was that he suddenly was taken off the schedule, and no one would say why, and since I would sometimes help make out the schedule I was certainly surprised by this. The next thing was that some of us were requested to go to Human Resources and speak with the lady in charge of the investigation. But all during this we were never told what it was all about. I have since learned that this is the way this is done. I guess this is the ethics of investigation.

This affected my personal values because I was truly torn about the whole thing. I felt and still feel that he really didn't understand what he had done wrong, and that he should have been reprimanded and then educated on the subject. But he was fired and that caused a lot of turmoil among his fellow peers. There was a lot of anger and resentment towards the management of both our department and Human Resources and the nurse/therapist relationship became very strained. This made the overall working environment somewhat hostile for quite some time. The staff demanded some kind of explanation. Well they got a meeting with the Directors but to them that meeting was just for show, as no one that attended felt like anything