Moral Injury in Emergency and Pre-hospital care. Esther Murray on St Emlyn’s podcast

This week we recorded a podcast inspired by a recent publication in the EMJ. Esther Murray aka @EM_Healthpsych is a psychologist working in London. You can listen the podcast by clicking on the link below.

Her recent paper on whether the experiences of medical students might precipitate moral injury during their pre-hospital experiences gives  an insight into how we all cope with and respond to the clinical work we do. Some of the work we do is traumatic, painful and morally difficult to rationalise. We are witness to the very worst aspects of some of our patient’s lives and there may be a price to pay.

I was delighted to explore some of the concepts around moral injury in this podcast and would really recommend that you read the paper 1 and consider whether this is something that can affect ourselves and our colleagues. The paper is open access at the moment so there is no excuse not to 😉

Although the paper is based on a small number of participants from only one aspect of the healthcare system it does recognise this limitation and alludes to future work with different groups of clinician.

What is Moral Injury?

Esther describes ‘moral injury’ as a concept emerging from work with military veterans. It is used to describe the psychological sequelae of ‘bearing witness to the aftermath of violence and human carnage’1–3

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@EMManchester

References
1.
Murray E, Krahé C, Goodsman D. Are medical students in prehospital care at risk of moral injury? E. June 2018:emermed-2017-207216. doi:10.1136/emermed-2017-207216
2.
Moral Injury. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_injury. Published 2018. Accessed August 30, 2018.
3.
Litz BT, Stein N, Delaney E, et al. Moral injury and moral repair in war veterans: A preliminary model and intervention strategy. C. 2009;29(8):695-706. doi:10.1016/j.cpr.2009.07.003

Cite this article as: Simon Carley, "Moral Injury in Emergency and Pre-hospital care. Esther Murray on St Emlyn’s podcast," in St.Emlyn's, August 30, 2018, https://www.stemlynsblog.org/moral-injury-in-emergency-and-pre-hospital-care-esther-murray-on-st-emlyns-podcast/.

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