AFT Health: Building a Morally Centered Healthcare Organization

The concept of moral injury* in healthcare gained attention six years ago, with a viral article in STAT that has been downloaded 300,000 times and is still one of the publication’s most read articles ever.1 The coronavirus pandemic intensified interest in the concept, and some investigators began quantifying the experience,2 while others looked at potential sources and drivers of the distress.3 I am a psychiatrist who worked for the Department of Defense and as an executive for an international nonprofit before turning to address clinician distress full time. Along with Simon Talbot, an academic plastic surgeon with a subspecialty in hand surgery, I have been working for nearly a decade to address clinician distress. During that time, we have searched for an organization that minimizes the risk of moral injury to hold up as an example, to no avail.