ReviewHealthcare (Basel, Switzerland)2025
Moral Distress and Emotional Exhaustion in Healthcare Professionals: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.
Review in Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland), 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 23 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
23 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Cultural Differences in the Relationship Between Negative Leadership Behaviours and Nurses' Emotional Exhaustion: A Systematic Review.Journal of nursing management · 2026Pooled it
- Moral Resilience and Its Associations with Workplace Gaslighting and Quiet Quitting: A Cross-Sectional Study of White-Collar Workers in Greece.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Psychological Health Risk Factors Among Healthcare Workers: A Structural Equation Modeling Approach.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Moral distress among nurses: an umbrella review of its prevalence, severity, causes, and consequences.BMC nursing · 2026Article
- Predictors of Moral Distress Among Nurses: A Cross-Sectional Study.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2026Article
- Behind the stethoscope: The hidden struggles and strengths of veterinarians in Italy.Veterinary record open · 2026Article
- Supporting Parental Decision-Making After Life-Limiting Fetal Diagnoses: The Role of Perinatal Hospice and the NOVA-L Decision Support System.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Burnout and Well-being at Work: Exploring Psychological Mechanisms Through Stress Appraisal Perspective.Annals of neurosciences · 2026Article
- Critical care nurses' perspectives on moral distress: a qualitative study in a public sector tertiary care setting.BMC nursing · 2026Article
- "The weight of words": a phenomenological study of Chinese neonatologists' lived experiences of delivering bad news.BMC medical ethics · 2026Article
- Article
- Physical Activity Prescription in Primary Health Care: An Ethical Analysis.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Nurses' experiences of moral suffering: A qualitative interview study.Nursing ethics · 2026Article
- Unveiling the psychological network of work alienation among nursing interns: A resource conservation perspective and network analysis.PloS one · 2026Article
- Moral distress among pediatric nurses: a cross-sectional study from Sichuan, China.Frontiers in pediatrics · 2026Article
- From Burnout to Resilience: Addressing Moral Injury in Nursing Through Organizational Innovation in the Post-Pandemic Era.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Review
- Experts' wisdom: challenges, rewards, key clinician characteristics, and advice in eating disorder treatment.Journal of eating disorders · 2025Article
- Exploring the Relation Between Nursing Workload and Moral Distress, Burnout, and Turnover in Latvian Intensive Care Units: An Ecological Analysis of Parallel Data.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2025Article
- Burnout and Moral Injury in Healthcare Workers: An Observational Study in a Romanian Chronic Care Hospital.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Moral Distress, Professional Burnout, and Potential Staff Turnover in Intensive Care Nursing Practice in Latvia-Phase 1.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2025Article
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.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
BACKGROUND/
objectivesMoral distress is commonly experienced by healthcare professionals (i.e., nurses) as ethical conflict. Previous literature suggests that moral distress contributes to emotional exhaustion in these professionals. We aimed to synthesize and analyze studies that examined the relationship between moral distress and emotional exhaustion in healthcare professionals.
methodsWeb of Science, Scopus, PubMed, Medline, and PsycInfo were used to search targeted studies written in English, Spanish, French, Italian, and Portuguese. The correlation coefficients of each study were extracted and converted into Fisher's
resultsA total of 14 studies with 2425 healthcare professionals were included. The Moral Distress Scale Revised (MDS-R) and the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI) were the most used scales to measure moral distress and emotional exhaustion, respectively. The pooled correlation coefficient between moral distress and emotional exhaustion was 0.33 (
conclusionsMoral distress is strongly correlated to emotional exhaustion in healthcare professionals. Future studies should focus on exploring the causal relationships between both variables as well as investigating potential moderators.
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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.