Speaker: Janine de Snoo @JaninedeSnoo
Affiliation: Amsterdam UMC
Title: Experiences of Moral Residue in Clinical Practice: Interviews with Healthcare Professionals
Abstract (long version below): We delve into the power of literary fiction in medical ethics education, focusing on moral residue (MR) experienced by healthcare practitioners (and other moral agents) when they perceive their own failure to meet moral requirements despite other people’s tendency not to blame them. Four inter-reliant papers describe ongoing research in an ERC Advanced Grant project (see Acknowledgement below), aimed at revolutionizing training of professionals by utilizing literary texts: these papers conceptualize and create a typology of MR, devise a measure for MR awareness, pinpoint text and context factors that may enhance awareness of MR, and implement an intervention using literary, fictional scenarios to facilitate moral learning in medical ethics.
Long abstract
To understand the phenomenon ‘moral residue’ in the context of the project, we need insights from practice, from those who actually experienced events and feelings of having morally failed despite not meriting blame by others. Therefore, we conducted 19 in-depth interviews with healthcare professionals about their experiences in practice with moral residue. These healthcare professionals came from diverse clinical settings, including emergency rooms, intensive care units, pediatrics and psychiatry. Semi-structured interviews were held and analyzed using a Grounded Theory approach. The stories they told us reveal important aspects of the experience of the phenomenon of ‘moral residue’. Moreover, the impact that the events had on their life offered insights for our project, both positively (in terms of coping and being supported by colleagues), as well as negatively (in terms of lingering feelings of despair and failure or taking an indifferent attitude towards their practice). At the symposium, we will discuss how these findings will feed into an understanding of how reading literature featuring fictional representations of moral residue may enhance awareness of the phenomenon in fiction and in life.