Brand Re-Launch: An update from Wendy Dean
“Our organizational presence must reflect the optimism, centeredness, and direction we feel about the work we do.”
Moral Injury of Healthcare was founded six years ago by physicians Wendy Dean and Simon Talbot after an outpouring of interest in a STAT News article they published in July 2018. The article, which went viral, was a thought experiment that proposed expanded language for occupational distress in healthcare. “Burnout,” it argued, missed a key element of clinicians’ experience, namely, the erosion of Hippocratic values by growing corporatization in healthcare. They called out that missing element as moral injury.
Emails and phone calls flooded in from physicians who said, ‘This is the language I’ve been looking for, for years.’ Nurses, physical therapists, social workers, and other healthcare professionals echoed this sentiment. But the cofounders expected the organization might shutter in just a few months when the viral cycle of interest ran its typical six-week course.
But six weeks, then six months, and now six years have passed without any sign of diminishing attention. In fact, though the article was published in 2018, it was one of the five most-read articles for STAT News in 2019, and has remained one of its most-read articles, ever. The resonance for health professionals is unmistakable.
While the military had been aware of moral injury for two decades, it was not widely known in healthcare until 2018. Consequently, raising awareness and educating groups about the concept was central to MIHC’s work for the first four years. Ironically, COVID-19’s devastation boosted moral injury awareness dramatically, as clinicians faced environments and decisions they had never imagined before. At the same time, other groups also adopted the language and asked for MIHC’s help – public defenders, educators, and even a large consulting firm wanted to know more.
As the coronavirus pandemic receded, though, it left in its wake an overstretched, under-resourced, and, in many cases, bitter health workforce, eyeing the exits and just waiting for their savings or retirement accounts to recover. The brittle trust between workers and organizations pre-COVID was shattered. Health systems, financially staggered by COVID, desperate to return to “business as usual” as quickly as possible, and anticipating the imminent demands of aging baby boomers, sought to quell high turnover and lackluster recruitment. Traditional burnout solutions are proving insufficient, though, likely because they targeted only one portion of occupational distress drivers.
Recognizing the urgent need for solutions, MIHC naturally pivoted to addressing moral injury beyond awareness. In the spring of 2023, we partnered with the Centre for Developmental and Complex Trauma at St. Andrew’s Healthcare, in England, to launch a Delphi study aimed at describing the characteristics of a non-morally injurious – a morally centered or restorative – organization. The study’s inception marked MIHC’s commitment to finding or developing prevention and mitigation strategies.
We, as an organization, are confident those strategies are imminent, and will provide significant relief for the health workforce, roughly half of whom currently endorse occupational distress. We also believe our organizational presence must reflect the optimism, centeredness, and direction we feel about the work we do.
This winter, we undertook a major self-assessment, redesigned our brand, refreshed our board, and are developing a five-year plan, which will be complete in the third quarter of this year. There is no map to better medicine, but we navigate using the collective moral compass of our oaths as a guide, with patients as true north.
Brand work courtesy of The Devoted Agency.