Reset Ethics follow-on work: Moral harm project

Working with hospital-based staff wellbeing professionals to address moral distress and moral injury amongst healthcare staff.

The Moral Harm project is a one-year project funded by the UKRI Arts and Humanities Research Council (AH/Y001877/1) as a follow-on impact project to develop findings from the NHS Reset Ethics research.

The Reset Ethics research found that Covid-19 infection control measures changed working practices and created barriers to the expression of care – where care is understood as embracing the interpersonal relationships between the patient (and their family) and the healthcare provider.

The moral distress and injury experienced by healthcare professionals, rather than a response to a single traumatic event, was often a response to being unable – repeatedly and over a long period of time - to practise (to offer care) in accordance with personal/professional values.

The impact funding will enable us to develop findings from the NHS Reset Ethics research with a new community – hospital wellbeing professionals. We understand ‘wellbeing professionals’ broadly, to include, for example, clinical psychologists, chaplaincy teams, counsellors, welfare teams and others whose role is to support the wellbeing of healthcare professionals.

To do this, we have brought together a group of wellbeing professionals who will work together with the research team to co-create our outputs. The overarching principle of co-creation is that a collaborative approach is taken to creative problem solving, and members of the project co-creation group will be invited to participate in all stages of this project.

Working collaboratively, we will use collective, consensus-building discussion to explore how ethical theories and an ‘ethical lens’ might offer additional means of supporting people experiencing moral distress. We will use these understandings to develop explanatory materials and web-based resources, and to develop best practice in this area.

We hope that an ongoing Community of Practice will be one of the lasting contributions of the work of the Moral Harm project.

The Moral harm project started on Sunday, 31 March 2024. The first (online) meeting of the Co-creation group was held on Wednesday 12 June, and subsequent meetings are planned for September and November (2024) and January (2025). We will update this page as the project progresses.