What Sustains Us: Gratitude for a Growing Community of Change-Makers
This November, we pause to acknowledge the collaborators, truth-tellers, and courageous leaders reshaping the culture of care.
November’s shorter days invite reflection. They bring a welcome pause to assemble raucous thoughts borne of months of travel, scores of conversations, and tomes filled with inspiring ideas into linear prose.
But first, some gratitude.
While my travel is often solitary, Moral Injury of Healthcare never does this work alone, and for that, all of us at MIHC are profoundly grateful.
This year our inspiration for this work, again, has come from the people who are courageously, publicly speaking out and demanding change: the Patient Revolution, the Beryl Institute, the Arnold P. Gold Foundation, and a group of retired octogenarian physicians, who find today’s healthcare increasingly unrecognizable from medicine with healing at its heart. These groups want to ensure we don’t forget that good medicine relies on the integrity of those who practice it, caring for patients at their most vulnerable. They hold tight to a vision of medicine at its best, and tirelessly work to realize it: excellent, safe, trustworthy, and kind care for all who need it, because we all deserve it.
We are inspired by plain spoken icons like Dr. Don Berwick, who calls out the toxicity of confiscatory systems and champions collaboration, coordination, and community in care.
We are grateful for the many “women in medicine” associations eager to learn more about our work, and for the individuals (you know who you are) trying to reshape decades-old institutions for the modern era of medicine. To their credit, some of those institutions are reckoning with their previous roles in engineering the current dysfunctional landscape of care and are committed to supporting solutions.
New faces in the fight for better care are board members who are changing their agendas and considering accountability – both theirs and their leadership teams’ – through a new lens. Gone are the days of passive participation. Every board member must spend time in clinical spaces, ask hard questions of clinicians, executives, and managers, and acknowledge their power to shape the culture of care. We are thankful for both their courage and their curiosity.
Our deepest thanks extend to our growing network of enthusiastic and driven collaborators:
Deborah Morris at the Centre for Developmental and Complex Trauma in the UK whose moral clarity, courage, and vision are simply extraordinary.
A growing international contingent of brilliant, passionate, thoughtful activists from France, the Netherlands, Malawi, and the UK, seeking commonality in our struggles and solidarity in finding solutions.
Colleagues in Virginia, Ohio, and New Hampshire who recognize and join good work, building foundational knowledge and data, upending the “funding first” mindset.
Journalists and authors, speaking truth about insidious harms, and joining our fiscal sponsee, the 43cc Podcast, to spread their knowledge to our far-flung community.
Executives who are courageously (and quietly) trying to wrest good from contorted systems.
And the patients who share their fears, their frustrations, and stories, believing with relentless optimism that medicine can be better and that they can find, or build, the care they deserve.
Finally, we are honored by our supporters: the one-time, issue-focused donors passionate about a cause and grateful that we see (and speak) its importance; the committed subscription donors who acknowledge the persistence of this work and give faithfully every single month; the end-of-year donors who contribute generously, often annually; and those who trust us with their stories, share our message with their networks, or offer their talents to further the work.
This work takes a community, and we are grateful, every day, for ours.