This book is about the United States specifically, but it contains valuable lessons for other countries as well. This book describes a situation where healthcare corporations put profits before people—squeezing appointments shorter and shorter and leaving no slack in the system to accommodate emergencies; understaffing to the point that only one doctor is responsible for three different areas of the hospital, putting lives at risk; and “persuading” physicians, on pain of losing their jobs, to avoid “revenue leakage” by referring patients (or as one particularly callous management type calls them, “profit-generating units”) to out-of-network providers, even if that provider is the best possible person for the patient in question. The pressures in this system have previously deemed to be “burning out” doctors, a term that puts a great deal of personal responsibility on the physician, like it’s their fault for not being able to withstand the heat. But when the system seems to be designed to THWART physicians’ ability to provide high-quality care to their patients, what they are really experiencing is moral injury.

The authors of this book first wrote an article about physicians and moral injury that appeared in STAT News. From there came this book. The authors gathered stories of physicians around the United States who have dealt with the moral injury in different ways. These are powerful stories and their lessons must be learned and built upon. ( )