Thread by @WesElyMD

1/🧵Moral Injury: #DeltaVariant surge & ICU beds shortages pose big risk
 
In my last week’s @WashingtonPost piece, I wrote, “Any health-care professional who has to make impossible ethical choices likely incurs MORAL INJURY.”

What is moral injury?

wapo.st/3l0gqJP

2/ This article tackles it: bit.ly/2Vp0Rka
It’s not burn-out, which is characterized by exhaustion, cynicism, and decreased productivity.
Moral injury occurs when we’re forced to make decisions that go against our deeply held beliefs.

3/ Moral injury was used in 2009 to describe Iraq soldiers’ responses to actions in war. It is “perpetrating, failing to prevent, bearing witness to, or learning about acts that transgress deeply held moral beliefs and expectations.”
 
bit.ly/37aI3YJ

4/ Moral injury is ““a deep soul wound that pierces a person’s identity, sense of morality, and relationship to society.”
 
bit.ly/3BYYLsd

5/ “The moral injury of health care is not the offense of killing another human in the context of war. It is being unable to provide high-quality care and healing in the context of health care.” Of course, the stakes are highest in a life-threatening disease like #COVID.

6/ Talbot & Dean: “Most MDs enter medicine as a calling, not career path. They have a desire to help people w religious zeal, endure lost sleep, lost years of young adulthood, huge opportunity costs, family strain, financial instability, even disregard for their own health.”

7/ Personally, I shudder to think about me or my colleagues incurring moral injury in the upcoming weeks/months of #COVID19, yet I must face the reality that this is not merely a hypothetical worry…