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International Centre for Moral Injury
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Moral Injury in Healthcare Professions

 

Video

Moral issues in care towards the end of life - a presentation by Dr Colette Hawkins

 

Books

Wendy Dean (2023). If I Betray These Words: Moral Injury in Medicine and Why It’s So Hard for Clinicians to Put Patients First (Steerforth Press)

Through the stories of thirteen clinicians across the USA who have experienced moral injury, Dean explores the ways in which patients’ best interests come into conflict with other forces in a privatised healthcare system. Dean offers a path forward for a system that would benefit both patients and the workforce.

Eldo E. Frezza, The Moral Distress Syndrome Affecting Physicians: How Current Healthcare is Putting Doctors and Patients at Risk

An exploration of ‘moral distress syndrome,’ a cognate to Moral Injury in the healthcare setting; Frezza argues for the caregivers’ own other-directed empathy as a key to both identifying Moral Injury in themselves and others, and as a cornerstone of recognising the societal elements of healthcare Moral Injury.

Cynda Hylton Rushton, Moral Resilience: Transforming Moral Suffering in Healthcare

A work that understands moral suffering by drawing close parallels with Buddhist understandings of suffering as an unavoidable part of caregiving. It offers ideas around sustainable moral practices and aligned values and language as ways to bring stability to the moral core of healthcare workers.

 

Press Articles

Mariam Alexander, “NHS Staff are suffering from ‘moral injury’, a distress usually associated with war zones” The Guardian, 21 April 2021

While this is an editorial piece in the Guardian, its author is a psychiatrist who notes the way that, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the language of the healthcare setting became increasingly militarised, and NHS workers also began to show clear signs of Moral Injury – in the sense of systemic betrayal, not having the resources to make proper moral decisions and facing high-stakes situations day after day.

 

Journal Articles

Rabin S , Kika N, Lamb D, Murphy D, AM Stevelink S, Williamson V, Wessely S & Greenberg N (2023) Moral injuries in healthcare workers: What causes them and what to do about them? Journal of Healthcare Leadership, 2023:15, 153-160

A comprehensive review article summarising evidence on (a) causes of moral injury in healthcare workers – systemic factors, team factors, individual factors, and factors evident as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, and (b) methods for reducing moral injury in healthcare workers – both before and after exposure to potentially morally injurious events and situations, and taking place at individual, team and institutional levels.