Audience: For doctors, nurses, first responders, medical staff, peer support to medical front line staff including psychologists, social workers, crisis hotline workers and clinical leaders.

In crisis, high-pressure situations, medical personnel and staff are exposed to or asked to follow out of the ordinary measures. These include for example, rationing of care and decision-making around who receives care in limited resource situations. Medical personnel can find these directives to be in direct conflict with their own personal moral belief systems and this can lead to the occurrence of moral injury. Persistence in this state of moral injury can lead to mental health outcomes such as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Anxiety, Depression and an inability to provide the best quality of care of patients. This training provides practical, easy to apply techniques to challenge persistence in this state and return persons to a healthy state of functioning.

Learning objectives

At the end of this session, participants will be able to do the following:

• Understand what is moral injury
• Understand the moral injury model which includes examples and demonstrates the mental health outcomes specific for healthcare professionals during the COVID-19 crisis
• Address common moral injury dilemmas through practical corrections grounded in cognitive behavior (CB) techniques