Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP) is partnering with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) to study the impact of financialization on U.S. health care. Starting in the fall of 2024, and continuing through the summer of 2025, we will engage currently practicing physicians to better understand moral injury and distress among health care professionals, how these issues impact racial inequities in health care, and how best to remedy this worsening problem.
Take our brief moral injury survey
Dr. Diljeet Singh explains our research project
What is “moral injury?”
As health care has been transformed from an essential service to a profit-driven business, the morale of the entire workforce—including physicians, nurses, and allied health professionals—has suffered. This trend has led to shortages as professionals are retiring early, cutting back work hours, quitting clinical medicine, and tragically committing suicide in increasing numbers.
These responses have often been misdiagnosed as “burnout,” but the lack of efficacy of standard treatments for burnout has led insightful scholars such as Drs. Wendy Dean and Simon Talbot to identify “moral injury” as a more accurate culprit.
Moral injury in health care is described as the challenge of knowing what care patients need, but being unable to provide it due to constraints beyond physicians’ control. As a result, our focus on burnout is insufficient and, in fact, causes harm by leading to a reliance on ineffectual “wellness” programs and an obscuring of root causes. Without adequate data on moral injury, the ability of policymakers and stakeholders to address our health care crisis will remain limited.
Take our moral injury survey
PNHP launched our moral injury project with an intake survey to help us better understand the impact of financialization in U.S. health care, and how it intersects with racial health inequities. You can take our 10-minute survey at pnhp.org/survey.
Please note the following to better understand our survey process:
- Our main audience for the survey is physicians who are currently practicing in the U.S.
- We are in the final stages of securing Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval.
- This survey functions as an intake tool for a series of 1:1 interviews to be conducted over the spring/summer.
- We will release a report of findings by the end of 2025, and will share this report with PNHP members, allies, and elected officials.
For reference, we have uploaded a PDF version of our complete moral injury survey HERE.
Share our moral injury survey
To properly understand the impact of financialization on U.S. health care, and how it intersects with racial health inequities, we will need to engage with thousands of currently practicing physicians. This means tapping our active PNHP members and going beyond this cadre of single-payer activists.
We need you to share the pnhp.org/survey link with currently practicing physicians in your network! To help you with this outreach, PNHP has put together a toolkit that includes:
- Moral injury project overview
- Sample email to recruit your colleagues
- Sample text message to recruit your colleagues
- Tips for sharing our survey in a professional setting
- Frequently asked questions
- Additional research
We’ve also developed a one-page info sheet with information about our moral injury project.
Respecting your privacy
PNHP’s moral injury survey covers delicate topics and gives participants the opportunity to share experiences from their practice—as well as experiences with specific employers, insurers, and other parties.
Rest assured that survey responses will be anonymized and that nobody outside of PNHP’s survey team will ever have access to individual replies.
We also ask survey respondents to share their email address, so we can follow up regarding potential 1:1 interviews. Please note:
- Individuals who are not already in PNHP’s database will not have their email added to our database unless they check an optional “include me in receiving updates” checkbox.
- If respondents are added to our email list, they can unsubscribe at any time (link at the bottom of all PNHP emails).
- PNHP will never sell or share emails collected through our moral injury survey.
Moral injury workshop (Nov. 2024)
PNHP president Dr. Diljeet Singh helped lead a workshop on moral injury at our 2024 Annual Meeting in Chicago. Download Dr. Singh’s slideshow HERE.