Awareness is increasing about the adverse impact of moral injury in health-care settings. Moral injury can occur regardless of an individual’s religious or non-religious beliefs. Yet currently available measures are unsuitable for assessing moral injury in healthcare workers living in secular societies such as the UK.
The 10-item Healthcare Moral Injury scale (HMIS) was designed to address this gap and assess moral injury in health-care workers, defined as the distress, weariness, and loss of trust that stems from the internal conflict between witnessing or performing acts of transgression, and the individual’s intrinsic ethical values.
The HMIS is a unidimensional scale that has demonstrated good construct validity including convergent validity with measures of burnout, hope (-), and good criterion-related validity, with the HMIS predicting greater severity of depression, anxiety, and PTSD, in healthcare workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. HMIS scores were also higher in front-line health-care workers than in non-front-line workers.
The paper documenting the development of the HMIS is currently in press and can be cited as follows:
Fradley, K., Sirois, F. M., & Bentall, R.. Ray, J., Bishop, R., Wadsley, J., & Danson, S. (in press). Assessing moral injury in healthcare workers living in secular societies: Introducing the Healthcare-Moral Injury Scale (HMIS). British Journal of Health Psychology (IF = 3.5). Open access.
You can access the HMIS by following this LINK
Please note this will lead you to a brief survey that will invite you to share your reasons for using the HMIS before linking you to the download page for the HMIS.
Fuschia Sirois 