ArticleNursing ethics2021
Moral injury in healthcare professionals: A scoping review and discussion.
Article in Nursing ethics, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 168 papers, 5 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
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Who cites it
168 citing papers in PubMed, 5 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 361 citations in OpenAlex.
- The experience of nurses when providing care across acts that may be perceived as death hastening: A qualitative evidence synthesis.Palliative medicine · 2025Pooled it
- Pooled it
- The Association of Moral Injury and Healthcare Clinicians' Wellbeing: A Systematic Review.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2023Pooled it
- Moral injury and mental health among health-care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic: meta-analysis.European journal of psychotraumatology · 2023Pooled it
- Prevalence, Predictors, and Experience of Moral Suffering in Nursing and Care Home Staff during the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Mixed-Methods Systematic Review.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2022Pooled it
- "Part of a cog, of a system; a system that's broken": social workers' experiences of moral injury in England.International journal of qualitative studies on health and well-being · 2026Article
- The Healer's Heartache: Reforming Medicine from the Rough Ground.Journal of general internal medicine · 2026Review
- Moral Injury, Peer Support and Allied Health Integration: Three Extensions to Gilmore et al.'s Account of Mental Health Crisis Care in Homelessness.Journal of psychiatric and mental health nursing · 2026Article
- Violence, Stigma, and Moral Injury in Nursing During the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Qualitative Analysis From 18 Countries in Latin America and the Caribbean.Nursing inquiry · 2026Article
- Rethinking Empowerment in Healthcare: A Dynamic Continuum.Nursing inquiry · 2026Article
- Article
- Moral Injury Beyond Burnout: A Scientometric Review of Clinician Distress and Its Blind Spots in Critical Care.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Review
- Algorithmic Moral Burden: Pope Leo XIV, Conscience, and Professional Agency in AI-Supported Philippine Healthcare.Journal of religion and health · 2026Article
- Experiences and Impacts of Working in Organisations Undergoing Regulatory Scrutiny: An Integrative Review.Journal of advanced nursing · 2026Review
- The biopsychosocial-spiritual impact on non-clinical health professionals who interact with traumatic and/or sensitive health data: A scoping review.Health information management : journal of the Health Information Management Association of Australia · 2026Article
- From equity to solidarity: how care and relationality transform the debate on justice in genomics.Journal of community genetics · 2026Article
- Moral distress and moral injury in healthcare: A review and instrument analysis.Journal of health psychology · 2026Review
- Resting-State Neural Signatures of Moral Injury: Associations With Rumination.Biological psychiatry. Cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging · 2026Article
- Caring for Caregivers: System-Level Solutions to Moral Injury in Burn Teams.Journal of burn care & research : official publication of the American Burn Association · 2026Review
- The Marginalization of Spiritual Dimensions in Nursing Moral Injury Research: A Bibliometric Analysis, 2018-2025.Journal of religion and health · 2026Article
108 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors at 3 institutions in 4 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Moral injury emerged in the healthcare discussion quite recently because of the difficulties and challenges healthcare workers and healthcare systems face in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Moral injury involves a deep emotional wound and is unique to those who bear witness to intense human suffering and cruelty. This article aims to synthesise the very limited evidence from empirical studies on moral injury and to discuss a better understanding of the concept of moral injury, its importance in the healthcare context and its relation to the well-known concept of moral distress. A scoping literature review design was used to support the discussion. Systematic literature searches conducted in April 2020 in two electronic databases, PubMed/Medline and PsychInfo, produced 2044 hits but only a handful of empirical papers, from which seven well-focused articles were identified. The concept of moral injury was considered under other concepts as well such as stress of conscience, regrets for ethical situation, moral distress and ethical suffering, guilt without fault, and existential suffering with inflicting pain. Nurses had witnessed these difficult ethical situations when faced with unnecessary patient suffering and a feeling of not doing enough. Some cases of moral distress may turn into moral residue and end in moral injury with time, and in certain circumstances and contexts. The association between these concepts needs further investigation and confirmation through empirical studies; in particular, where to draw the line as to when moral distress turns into moral injury, leading to severe consequences. Given the very limited research on moral injury, discussion of moral injury in the context of the duty to care, for example, in this pandemic settings and similar situations warrants some consideration.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.