The nurse later said she sensed the surgeon was in a bad mood when he walked into the operating room. Things did not improve when she handed him the wrong size gloves, and they deteriorated further when he began shouting at her and then dismissed her from the procedure.

“She came out very, very upset,” the executive director of perioperative services at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, Pamela Mestel, recently recalled, sharing details of the spat that emerged when the nurse and surgeon faced each other again during a mediated discussion monitored by hospital officials.

While such disputes occur regularly in hospitals, Maimonides has adopted a “Code of Mutual Respect” that requires medical staff to treat colleagues well or face peer review and possible discipline.

High-powered physicians, some with bad tempers, are not new. But increasingly, hospitals such as Maimonides are attempting to curb the reputations of rude or arrogant surgeons and doctors by instituting policies that hold all employees accountable for their behavior.

“There’s the God complex people talk about when they talk about surgeons. Medicine, fortunately, is changing for a lot of reasons. No longer is that kind of behavior acceptable,” the vice president of perioperative services at Maimonides and author of the hospital’s “Code of Mutual Respect,” Dr. David Feldman, said.

Earlier this month, a national accrediting body for hospitals, the Joint Commission, issued an “alert” warning that rude language and hostile behavior in health care settings poses a threat to patient safety. Starting in January, the commission will require hospitals to have a code of conduct that defines acceptable and inappropriate behaviors and includes a procedure for managing disruptive behavior.

Hospital industry officials said they were not concerned that hospitals would lose their accreditation because of the rule, but they indicated they would examine their policies to ensure they comply with the commission’s recommendations.

“I think anything that comes from the Joint Commission, we have to take very seriously,” the medical director of Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, Dr. Jeffrey Weiss, said.

Dr. Weiss said in recent years, Montefiore has adopted a culture that emphasizes the “patient experience,” or one that focuses on how the patient perceives his or her treatment. “If the phlebotomist is drawing blood and makes you feel scared, that could cloud your whole perception of your three-day stay at a hospital,” he said.

The hospital also is committed to teaching its doctors in training to act with professionalism, Dr. Weiss said. “Part of our overall evaluation is not just what people know anymore, but how patients perceive them, how they interact with patients and colleagues,” he said.

In hospital circles, there is no shortage of anecdotes to inspire the current push to improve behavior.

Dr. Feldman, of Maimonides, recalled a nurse and an anesthesiologist who clashed in front of a group of bewildered onlookers when the nurse neglected to inform the anesthesiologist of a scheduling change. “He really lashed into her,” Dr. Feldman said. “He did it, apparently, from down the hall, and other people heard him, which is not a good thing.”

But Dr. Feldman insisted that the hospital’s code of mutual respect, which includes a peer review process, is “not about trying to get people in trouble.”

Taking cues from the airline industry, Dr. Feldman said he got the idea for writing the behavioral rules several years ago. “Over time, it became more and more clear to me that physician behavior and the behavior of anybody in the health care realm really had a direct impact on patient care,” he said, describing situations in which someone becomes so intimidated by another that they do not speak up when they see a potential error.

At Maimonides, hospital staff credit the medical center’s president, Pamela Brier, who made clear during staff meetings that she would hold everyone to the same standard. “I said, ‘Look, I’m going to commit to you that nobody at the medical center has a title so senior or is a doctor that brings in so much money that they’re exempt from behaving properly,'” Ms. Brier recalled recently.

So far, at least one physician has been dismissed for behavioral reasons.

Even among hospitals that do not prescribe specific codes of behavior for physicians and staff, several have implemented mechanisms to promote safety. Beth Israel Medical Center’s “red rules” give every hospital employee the right to stop a procedure if they see something they think is unsafe.

According to the hospital’s president, Dr. David Shulkin, if a surgeon rushes into an operating room and urges others to skip certain procedures, such as marking the body part that is to be operated on, nurses and technicians may stop the surgery in its tracks. “In the past, some physicians got away with that” when hospitals adopted the position of “we don’t want to offend the doctor, he’ll take his cases somewhere else,” he said.

Dr. Shulkin, who has prioritized patient safety since taking over at Beth Israel three years ago, said the appropriate attitude starts at the top.

At Maimonides, officials said the nurse and surgeon who fought over the gloves now are on speaking terms, following a successful mediation. “It’s a very stressful environment, but by yelling or not speaking to someone, it only increases the stress,” Ms. Mestel said.