Developing bullying prevention guidelines for nurse interns' and its effects on their assertiveness.

Background: Bullying is a serious problem that has short and long term negative consequences for nurse interns. Bullying prevention guidelines have a great impact on reducing the incidence of bullying among nurse interns.

Aim: The present study aimed to evaluate the effect of developing bullying prevention guidelines on nurse interns' assertiveness levels.

Methods: A methodological study design was used to conduct the study at Ain Shams University Hospitals in Cairo Governorate, Egypt. The study subjects consisted of all nurse interns enrolled in the 2022-2023 internship year and their number 121 nurse interns. The data were collected using four tools: the Bullying Knowledge Questionnaire, the Negative Act Questionnaire Revised (NAQ-R), the Individual Bullying Behaviors in Clinical Practice Survey, and the Assertiveness Inventory.

Results: The scores for total bullying knowledge and assertiveness after the implementation of the prevention guidelines were significantly increased (91.4% and 86.3%, respectively) among those who were exposed to bullying than among those with pretest scores of (34.7% and 11.8% respectively) (P < 0.001).

Conclusion: Bullying prevention guidelines significantly reduced nurse interns bullying and improved their assertiveness. The study recommended the dissemination and generalization of the developed bullying prevention guidelines in different training settings.