Moral Injury in Critical Care

As the reality of rationing intensive care resources takes hold, moral injury, a term once only used within the military, is now entering the nursing vocabulary.

The current COVID-19 pandemic is currently placing healthcare professionals across the world under extreme pressure. Decisions have to be made about how to allocate scarce resources, or who amongst equally needy patients receives priority treatment. Further pressures come when nurses are faced with balancing their own physical and mental healthcare needs with those of their patients, and over time this is leading many nurses to experience feelings of moral injury (Greenberg et.al 2020).

What is Moral Injury?

Williamson, Murphy and Greenberg (2020) define moral injury as the profound psychological distress that results from actions, or the lack of them, which violate a person’s moral or ethical code.