In this episode of Moral Matters, Drs. Simon Talbot and Wendy Dean discuss their own experiences with personal challenges that led them to develop the framework of moral injury.
Do you have an experience that sounds similar? We want to hear from you.
Send a voice memo or note to info@moralinjury.healthcare.
Conversations about moral injury in healthcare and elsewhere, how it affects us all, and the growing need for change, with the authors of the STATNews article that started it all, Wendy Dean, MD and Simon G. Talbot, MD. This is Episode 1: Introducing Moral Matters.
Connect with us at www.fixmoralinjury.org, on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
00:00 – Introduction
0:26 – Our goals
1:00 – Who we are
3:50 – What is the essence of distress?
4:15 – Resilient, but still burned out
5:26 – What is the right diagnosis?
6:30 – The genesis of Moral Injury
7:32 – Moral Injury’s relationship to burnout
11:00 – Defining Moral Injury
12:00 – Contributing factors
15:15 – Cross-pollination for innovative, thoughtful solutions
“The pandemic arrived to a healthcare system that’s already deeply in crisis,” said Wendy Dean, a psychiatrist and president of Moral Injury of Healthcare, a group that advocates for more sustainable medical workplaces. “All of the challenges that clinicians are facing prior to the pandemic are just highlighted, exacerbated, and added to.”
In this piece with Talkspace, Dr. Dean outlines some of the basics of moral injury prevention for individuals to take.
As always, our organization has resources available for organizations and individuals experiencing moral injury due to COVID-19.
In a recent article by Pratihba Gopalakrishna, a new study is discussed that focuses on burnout and how commonplace it may be. However, Drs. Wendy Dean and Simon Talbot believe the definition of burnout needs to be reexamined.
“If we’re going to talk about the condition of burnout, then we need to be much more rigorous about applying a strict definition and measure so that everybody’s talking about the same thing using the same scale,” said Wendy Dean, a psychiatrist and the co-founder of the nonprofit organization Moral Injury of Healthcare. Dean was not involved in the new research.
Read the full article on STAT News.
In this piece entitled A Yoga Mat Won’t Fix Your Moral Injury by Ira Bedzow, PhD, moral injury is explored by Dr. Bedzow as a medical ethicist.
But people who suffer from moral injury are not slogging through endless tasks, and they are certainly not losing interest and motivation–they are hurting. And their hurt comes from their perceived inability to meet personal and professional expectations and the moral accountability they feel by their sense of failure.
Drs. Wendy Dean and Simon G. Talbot are highlighted as the experts leading the way on solutions for moral injury. As Dr. Bedzow notes, yoga mats and meditation are not longterm solutions for moral injury.
In this segment with NPR’s Here and Now, Dr. Wendy Dean is interviewed by Amanda Peacher on the toll the COVID-19 crisis is taking on front line staff in hospitals.
Some psychiatrists are even manning a hotline to help their fellow healthcare workers. Listen in via the link below.
In this most recent article from Drs. Dean and Talbot, they explore the concept of mindfulness as a diagnostic, rather than treatment for moral injury.
What would happen if clinicians flipped the script on mindfulness, and instead of using it to tolerate a broken system, used it to sharpen awareness of the challenges?
Explore this with the doctors in their latest piece published on KevinMD below.
While other corners of the health-care world struggled to care for patients, protect staff, and find scarce equipment, for-profit health insurance companies did just fine. Drs. Wendy Dean and Simon G. Talbot co-authored this article with Dr. Samuel Shem.
Crises often highlight both the best and the worst of humanity. Coronavirus is no exception. It has brought out the best in America’s health-care workforce. It also has deeply wounded the healthcare workers through moral injuries.
As health systems address employee mental health, they’re finding women are most at-risk. Moral injury is front and center on the spectrum of harm.
Health care providers face a rising mental and emotional toll amid the pandemic. Peer support programs can alleviate internal burdens and create a spirit of shared empathy.
