Understanding Moral Injury in Healthcare with Wendy Dean, MD

Habitual Excellence, Presented by Value Capture

Psychiatrist, expert on "moral injury" in healthcare, author

Welcome to Episode #77 of Habitual Excellence, presented by Value Capture.

Episode page with transcript, video, links, and more

Our guest today is Wendy Dean, MD, a psychiatrist. She is the President and co-founder of “Moral Injury of Healthcare,” a nonprofit organization focused on alleviating workforce distress.

A seminal article she co-authored with Simon Talbot, MD for STATNews in July of 2018 began the conversation about moral injury in healthcare.

She’s the co-author of the upcoming book If I Betray These Words: Moral Injury in Medicine and Why It's So Hard for Clinicians to Put Patients First. It will be available April 4th and you can pre-order it now through the publisher.

In today's episode, Dr. Dean talks with host Mark Graban, about topics and questions, including:

• What is “moral injury”?

Definition 1: “perpetrating, failing to prevent, bearing witness to, or learning about acts that transgress deeply held moral beliefs and expectations.”

Definition 2: “a deep soul wound that pierces a person’s identity, sense of morality, and relationship to society.”

• Why is moral injury different (and worse) than “burnout”?
• What’s the effect of moral injury?
• Can anything be done to reverse moral injury and its effects? Or just need to stop injuring others?
• What are some of the primary causes of moral injury in healthcare?
• How is the healthcare system broken?
• Recommendations related to EMR/EHR?
• Getting rid of "the stupid stuff"
• The role of psychological safety in creating an enabling environment…
• Why did you stop practicing as a psychiatrist?
• What’s the Level of moral injury in countries like Canada or England that have very different healthcare systems?
• What reforms do you recommend? With urgency...
• A "Clinician Protection Act"?

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