A Grand Rounds presentation for RUOK Day 2022 for The Prince Charles Hospital.

Workforce distress in healthcare—moral injury—was a crisis long before the COVID-19 pandemic. COVID highlighted the vulnerabilities in our healthcare systems and helped us to evolve from the idea of burnout (an individual-centric experience of exhaustion and detachment) to that of moral injury (the disconnect between the care we want to provide to patients and the care we feel equipped to provide). As such, the strategy of “engagement as the antidote to burnout” becomes bilateral, with organisations sharing accountability for this divide, and working with clinicians to address it. In the meantime, our teams act as the buffer that allows us to meet our primary goal of delivering good patient care despite system constraints. It will be our teams that ensure that we are OK in 2022.