Moral distress in the COVID era weighs on hospitalists
Moral distress can result when health professionals like doctors and nurses feel prevented from doing what they know is right and ethically correct – reflecting the values of their profession and their own sense of professional integrity – because of unmanageable caseload demands, lack of resources, coverage limitations, or institutional policies.
Dr. Elizabeth Dzeng
Hospitalists are not exempt from moral distress, which is associated with soul-searching, burnout, and even PTSD. It is also associated with a higher likelihood for professionals to report an intention to leave their jobs. But the COVID-19 pandemic has superimposed a whole new layer of challenges, constraints, and frustrations, creating a potent mix of trauma and exhaustion, cumulative unease, depleted job satisfaction, and difficult ethical choices.
These challenges include seeing so many patients die and working with short supplies of personal protective equipment (PPE) – with resulting fears that they could catch the virus or pass it on to others, including loved ones. Also, not having enough ventilators or even beds for patients in hospitals hit hard by COVID surges raises fears that decisions for rationing medical care might become necessary.
In a commentary published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine in October 2019 – shortly before the COVID pandemic burst onto the scene – hospitalist and medical sociologist Elizabeth Dzeng, MD, PhD, MPH, and hospital medicine pioneer Robert Wachter, MD, MHM, both from the University of California, San Francisco, described “moral distress and professional ethical dissonance as root causes of burnout.”1 They characterized moral distress by its emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, reduced sense of accomplishment, and moral apathy, and they called for renewed attention to social and ethical dimensions of practice and threats to physician professionalism.
Dr. Robert M. Wachter
Prevailing explanations for documented high rates of burnout in doctors have tended to focus on work hours and struggles with electronic medical records and the like, Dr. Dzeng and Dr. Wachter wrote. “We see evidence of an insidious moral distress resulting from physicians’ inability to act in accord with their individual and professional ethical values due to institutional and social constraints.”
COVID has intensified these issues surrounding moral distress. “In a short period of time it created more situations that raise issues of moral distress than I have seen since the early days of HIV,” Dr. Wachter said. “Those of us who work in hospitals often find ourselves in complex circumstances with limited resources. What was so striking about COVID was finding ourselves caring for large volumes of patients who had a condition that was new to us.”
And the fact that constraints imposed by COVID, such as having to don unwieldy PPE and not allowing families to be present with hospitalized loved ones, are explainable and rational only helps a little with the clinician’s distress.
People talk about the need for doctors to be more resilient, Dr. Dzeng added, but that’s too narrow of an approach to these very real challenges. There are huge issues of workforce retention and costs, major mental health issues, suicide – and implications for patient care, because burned-out doctors can be bad doctors.
