This week I am reading Moral Injury: Healing The Healers by Jennie Byrne who makes a distinction between “burnout” and “moral injury” saying that burnout is a person, individual phenomenon while “moral injury” is a systems problem. There is overlap between the two but the strategies for dealing with the two phenomena can be quite different.
A similar phenomenon is PTSD, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, which is an increasingly popular topic among health care professionals and the public.
Services and organizational strategies to ameliorate the two phenomenon can be misguided if the problem being targeted is misunderstood and not an appropriate explanation for the signs and symptoms manifested. We can’t find helpful answers to the problem if the right questions are not being asked.
So what is the difference between burnout and moral injury? Knowing the difference is one of the competencies of Advanced Professional Practice.
