Moral Distress Rounds: Development of a New Technique to Alleviate Moral Distress
Thursday, October 12, 2023
8:15 AM – 9:30 AM ET
Location: Bristol (Third Floor)
Moral distress is increasingly recognized as a multi-disciplinary phenomenon that results in job dissatisfaction, loss of empathy, and burnout. Despite this recognition, there are few evidence-based interventions that have been shown to decrease moral distress. At our institution, we have instituted “moral distress rounds,” an intervention run by the clinical ethics consultation service that aims to identify and alleviate moral distress. Moral distress rounds differ from clinical ethics consultation in that they are clinician-focused rather than patient-focused, but similar in that both often reveal ethical concerns that are affecting patient care.
In this paper presentation, we describe our experience with moral distress rounds and the growth of moral distress rounds in a large, multi-site pediatric health care system over the last seven years. We will first describe the development of moral distress rounds including their structure, their distinction from other resiliency interventions, and their focus on moral agency. Next, we will discuss clinical situations in which moral distress rounds may supplant clinical ethics consultation and situations in which moral distress rounds are complementary to clinical ethics consultation. Finally, we will present early descriptive data from our recently created moral distress rounds database including who participates in moral distress rounds, the types of themes encountered, and participant assessments of their usefulness.
Karen Jones, RN, MS, HEC-C – Clinical Ethics Program Manager, Clinical Ethics, Children's Hospital Colorado; Curtis Coughlin, PhD, MS, MBE, HEC-C – Associate Professor, Pediatrics and Center for Bioethics and Humanities, University of Colorado; Jacqueline Glover, PhD, HEC-C – Professor of Pediatrics, Center for Bioethics and Humanities and Pediatrics, University of Colorado