April 15, 2024 — In this month's issue of Federal Practitioner, our Co-founders Drs. Wendy Dean and Simon Talbot publish their latest paper, Moral Injury in Health Care: A Unified Definition and its Relationship to Burnout.

April 8, 2024 — Our CEO Dr. Wendy Dean joined the Rx for Success podcast for an in-depth conversation with Dr. Randy Cook.

March 20, 2024 — Our CEO and co-founder Dr. Wendy Dean joined the Schwartz Center for Compassionate Healthcare for a special webinar, "Reframing Distress: Why Moral Injury Matters."

March 18, 2024 — POLITICO published a piece in its Future Pulse column entitled, “It’s not burnout, it’s moral injury.”

March 14, 2024 — Today, Moral Injury of Healthcare is pleased to share recent developments and upcoming events.

February 14, 2024 — This morning, the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee's Subcommittee on Health will hold a legislative hearing titled "Legislative Proposals to Support Patients and Caregivers.”

If I Betray These Words: Moral Injury in Medicine and Why It's So Hard for Clinicians to Put Patients First is a Bronze Winner in the Book, Story, or Feature category for the 3rd Annual Anthem Awards.

Wendy Dean, MD speaks on what the corporate practice of health care has done to the medical profession. What does this mean to us as professionals and physicians?

This is a conversation about the dissonance between our expectations of what work can offer our lives and the reality of what our jobs and careers are capable of delivering; about whether work can ever really love us back. But there’s a bigger picture here, too. Workers are quitting their jobs in record numbers. Strikes are taking place across the country. In her role as a labor reporter, Jaffe has spent much of the past year interviewing workers across the country — spanning industries from retail to health care to tech — giving her insight into the shift in attitudes behind this uproar in the labor market. So that’s where we begin: Why are so many Americans radically rethinking work?

1 in 5 American health care workers have left the profession since the pandemic hit. The pandemic has pushed what was already a tough situation into crisis mode. And as psychiatrist Wendy Dean sees it, this is more than just burnout.

Burnout and the burden of life-and-death decisions have driven some exhausted front-line staff to the edge. In this long-form piece by Financial Times writer India Ross, Dr. Wendy Dean lends her expertise as a psychiatrist and the framework of moral injury to contextualize the deep trauma facing healthcare workers today.

The country of the United States is experiencing complex trauma. That trauma is silently influencing how we think, how we make decisions, and how we act in powerful ways that are predictable to experts in psychological trauma, but often obscure to those in the midst of it.

Originally used to describe what soldiers experience in wartime, moral injury in health care began to be applied to health care even before the pandemic, says Wendy Dean, MD, a psychiatrist and the president and co-founder of Moral Injury of Healthcare, a nonprofit devoted to reframe clinician distress as moral injury — and to work to improve the source of it, which she and others say is the health care system itself.

Burnout and depression are still serious problems among physicians, especially amid COVID-19. More than 12,000 physicians told us how burnout has affected their relationships, career, and happiness. Dr. Wendy Dean helps frame this conversation with moral injury.

The collectivist spirit of sewing masks and applauding health care workers from the spring has given way to vitriolic politicization of basic public health measures like mask-wearing, said Wendy Dean, a physician who co-founded the nonprofit Moral Injury of Healthcare to highlight issues of clinician distress.

Wendy Dean, M.D., a psychiatrist and president and co-founder of Moral Injury of Healthcare, says that following the long period of rigorous training, focusing on independent, critical thinking with strict adherence to algorithms based on reimbursement policies can be grating.

In advance of a white paper collaboration with Moral Injury of Healthcare and Array Architects and Design, this article highlights a pivot in design and architecture to clinician centered design.

“All of us have the need to feel normal,” she says. “But we’re continuing to demand as much of ourselves as we did before – to be the perfect parent, the perfect worker, the perfect student. People have to find a way to have forgiveness for themselves and recognize that they’re doing the very best they can.”

In our latest piece for STAT News, Drs. Dean and Talbot examine how it is time for leaders of hospitals and health care systems to add another, deeper layer of support for their staff by speaking out publicly and collectively in defense of science, safety, and public health, even if it risks estranging patients and politicians.

What exactly is moral injury – and how do we address the continued challenges faced by healthcare workers?