ReviewJournal of healthcare leadership2023
Moral Injuries in Healthcare Workers: What Causes Them and What to Do About Them?
Review in Journal of healthcare leadership, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 34 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Who cites it
34 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 56 citations in OpenAlex.
- Part 3: Ethics: 2025 American Heart Association Guidelines for Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation and Emergency Cardiovascular Care.Circulation · 2025Guideline
- Moral injury and mental health among health-care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic: meta-analysis.European journal of psychotraumatology · 2023Pooled 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 moral significance of moral distress.Medicine, health care, and philosophy · 2026Review
- 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
- Reflective practice to reduce moral injury in healthcare workers.Occupational medicine (Oxford, England) · 2026Review
- Moral distress and moral injury in healthcare: A review and instrument analysis.Journal of health psychology · 2026Review
- Reflections on Ethical Leadership: Organizational Ethics and Moral Injury.Healthcare management forum · 2026Article
- Perspectives on Attrition Among Emergency Physicians.JAMA network open · 2026Article
- Supporting families and building relationships: Evaluation of a home and sleep safety equipment scheme for impoverished communities.Public health in practice (Oxford, England) · 2026Article
- The Effect of Moral Injury Symptoms of Intensive Care Nurses on their Attitudes and Behaviors Towards End-of-Life Care: A Cross-Sectional and Analytical Study in Turkey.Journal of religion and health · 2026Article
- Defining Moral Injury: A Natural Scaffold.Journal of religion and health · 2026Article
- Understanding ethical encounters in a hospital setting: a qualitative study.BMC medical ethics · 2026Article
- Burnout, PTSD, and Medical Error: The Medico-Legal Implications of the Mental Health Crisis Among Frontline Healthcare Professionals During COVID-19.Medicina (Kaunas, Lithuania) · 2026Review
- Clinicians' Experiences of Providing Compulsory Care for Youth With Anorexia Nervosa: A Qualitative Study.The International journal of eating disorders · 2026Article
- Review
- Back to Basics: A Curriculum to Address the Pediatric Cardiac Anesthesia Workforce Crisis.Paediatric anaesthesia · 2026Article
- A mixed methods analysis of clinics' perspectives on community factors influencing access to medications for opioid use disorder.Addiction science & clinical practice · 2026Article
- Complicity in Moral Injury: A Study of Moral Phenomena in Healthcare Work Settings.Journal of healthcare leadership · 2026Article
- We are still in it: a conceptual model for moral injury and burnout in alternative response programs to guide intervention.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2026Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
8 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Moral injury (MI) refers to the persisting distress which may occur following exposure to potentially morally injurious events (PMIEs). The COVID-19 pandemic has drawn attention to MI in healthcare workers, who have been found to experience more frequent PMIEs in their day-to-day work than those in other occupational groups such as the military. These events may occur on an individual, team, organizational or system level and have been associated with increased clinician burnout and distress, and poor psychological wellbeing. This paper focuses on healthcare workers' experiences of MI, including potential causes and ways to reduce them. There are myriad challenges that influence the development of MI, such as chronic understaffing and the pressure to treat high numbers of patients with limited resources. There are also multiple impacts of MI: at the individual-level, MI can lead to increased staff absences and understaffing, and prolonged patient contact with limited decision-making power. COVID-19 exacerbated such impacts, with a lack of organizational support during a time of increased patient mortality, and uncertainty and heightened pressure on the clinical frontline associated with scarce resources and understaffing. Potential methods for reduction of MI in healthcare workers include pre-exposure mitigation, such as fostering work environments which treat PMIEs in the same way as other occupational hazards and post-exposure mitigation, such as facilitating healthcare workers to process their experiences of PMIEs in peer support groups or with spiritual advisors and, if MI is associated with mental ill-health, talking therapies using trauma-focused and compassion-oriented frameworks.
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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.