Moral injury and well-being in essential workers during the COVID-19 pandemic: local survey findings
This article has been Reviewed by the following groups
Listed in
- Evaluated articles (ScreenIT)
Abstract
Essential workers have faced many difficult situations working during the pandemic. Staff may feel that they, or other people, have acted wrongly and be distressed by this. This represents moral injury, which has been linked with significant mental ill health.
Methods
This survey asked essential workers in County Durham and Darlington about their experiences during the first wave of the pandemic and anything they felt would help. Well-being and moral injury were rated using sliders.
Results
There were 566 responses. A majority of respondents reported feeling troubled by other people’s actions they felt were wrong (60% scored over 40, where 0 is ‘not at all troubled’ and 100 ‘very troubled’, median score=52.5). Respondents were generally less troubled by their own actions (median score=3). Well-being and moral injury scores varied by employment sector (eg, National Health Service (NHS) staff were more troubled by the actions of others than non-NHS staff).
Staff suggestions included regular supervisor check-ins, ensuring kindness from everyone, fair rules and enforcement and improving communication and processes. Respondents offered simple, practical actions that could be taken by leaders at team, organisation, societal and governmental levels to tackle moral injury and the underlying causes of moral injurious environments.
Conclusion
Using these findings to develop a strategy to address moral injury is important, not only for staff well-being, but staff retention and continued delivery of vital services in these challenging times. Working together, we can seek to reduce and mitigate ‘moral injury’ the same way we do for other physical workplace ‘injuries’.
Article activity feed
-
-
SciScore for 10.1101/2021.06.14.21257728: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Ethics not detected. Sex as a biological variable not detected. Randomization not detected. Blinding not detected. Power Analysis not detected. Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:This survey has several limitations including being limited to one area in northern England, variation in response rates across employment sectors and use simple of self-rated sliders for moral injury and wellbeing. However, respondent suggestions may …
SciScore for 10.1101/2021.06.14.21257728: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Ethics not detected. Sex as a biological variable not detected. Randomization not detected. Blinding not detected. Power Analysis not detected. Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:This survey has several limitations including being limited to one area in northern England, variation in response rates across employment sectors and use simple of self-rated sliders for moral injury and wellbeing. However, respondent suggestions may provide ideas for simple actions, which represent good practice, for leaders looking after the wellbeing of staff. Working together, we can seek to reduce and mitigate moral injury in the same way we do for physical injuries inside and outside the workplace.
Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.
Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.
Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.
Results from rtransparent:- Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- No protocol registration statement was detected.
Results from scite Reference Check: We found no unreliable references.
-
