Moral Injury Is Why The Best Doctors Are Disappearing with Dr. Wendy Dean

Dr. Wendy Dean is a psychiatrist, author, and the co-founder of Moral Injury of Healthcare, a nonprofit dedicated to understanding and alleviating clinician distress. In 2018, she co-wrote a 500-word op-ed in STAT News that did something rare: it handed an entire profession the language for something most physicians had been carrying alone. The argument was simple and devastating.

Physicians aren't burning out.

That implies a personal failure of resilience. What's actually happening is moral injury, the damage that accumulates when you are repeatedly forced to act in ways that violate your own moral code.

That piece started an international conversation that Wendy has been leading ever since, through her book "If I Betray These Words," her podcast 43cc, and her ongoing research and consulting work with health systems around the world.

In this episode of How I Doctor, Dr. Graham Walker sits down with Wendy to go deep on what moral injury actually is, why getting the language right matters so much, and what a healthcare system that takes clinician distress seriously would actually need to look like. They cover AI's entry into an already fractured system, the EMR as a cautionary tale the profession is at risk of repeating, and the grief that comes with watching a profession you love get slowly hollowed out.

What You'll Learn in This Episode:

• Why burnout and moral injury are distinct problems that require fundamentally different solutions, and why naming it correctly changes where responsibility sits
• What it actually feels like to be morally injured, and why the absence of a bid to repair a betrayal is often where the real damage sets in
• How physicians are trained to be independent thinkers and then placed in systems that give them no authority, no agency, and all of the responsibility
• Why Wendy believes AI is walking into the same trap as the EMR, and what the liability question nobody in health law has answered yet tells us about where this is heading
• What gives Wendy genuine hope that medicine gets to the other side, and why the grief physicians are carrying right now is also a signal that the fight is not over

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It's all coming together

Abridge is hosting its first-ever Keynote, live from New York City and streaming globally for the Offcall community. Join Abridge CEO and Founder, Dr. Shiv Rao, for a presentation on the future of AI in healthcare. Register at https://events.abridge.com/keynote