Healing the ‘moral injury’ of clinicians will take a village

When two physicians wrote recently in STAT that their colleagues aren’t burning out but are instead suffering from “moral injury,” they struck a nerve. Thousands of physicians across the country talked about it on social media and discussion boards; rapper and internist ZDoggMD spent nearly 30 minutes discussing it with his followers. This is a subject that clinicians have been talking about in differing, veiled terms for years. It’s reflected in the quiet whispers that something is wrong — something more than mouse clicks and workflows. Is it any surprise that a broken system has produced a broken workforce?