Simon G Talbot and Wendy DeanBMJ blogs
Originally posted 16 Jan 20
Here is an excerpt:
We believe that distress is a clinician’s response to multiple competing allegiances—when they are forced to make a choice that transgresses a long standing, deeply held commitment to healing. Doctors today are caught in a double bind between making patients’ needs the top priority (thereby upholding our Hippocratic Oath) and giving precedence to the business and financial frameworks of the healthcare system (insurance, hospital, and health system mandates).
Since our initial publication, we have come to believe that burnout is the end stage of moral injury, when clinicians are physically and emotionally exhausted with battling a broken system in their efforts to provide good care; when they feel ineffective because too often they have met with immovable barriers to good care; and when they depersonalize patients because emotional investment is intolerable when patient suffering is inevitable as a result of system dysfunction. Reconfiguring the healthcare system to focus on healing patients, rebuilding a sense of community and respect among doctors, and demonstrating the alignment of doctors’ goals with those of our patients may be the best way to address the crisis of distress and, potentially, find a way to prevent burnout. But how do we focus the restructuring this involves?
“Moral injury” has been widely adopted by doctors as a description for their distress, as evidenced by its use on social media and in non-academic publications. But what is at the heart of it? We believe that moral injury occurs when the basic elements of the medical profession are eroded. These are autonomy, mastery, respect, and fulfillment, which are all focused around the central principle of purpose.
The info is here.
