It’s the Holiday Season…

The holiday season is upon us and between the visits with friends and family and frantically trying to get things done, we often reflect on the year and what we might focus on going forward in the year to come.

For me, the reflection that has landed most solidly is on the topic of moral injury and how to best deal with it. This is a common issue in healthcare, but I am sure is affecting much of the American workforce. More and more, professionals of all types are finding themselves spending more and more of their time and energy on the “things” of work and not on the core skills and relationships that drew them to their career in the first place. For example, in healthcare the “things” of work involve completing the chart for billing documentation, filling out forms to justify additional tests or consultations for the insurance companies and responding to a variety of electronic messages from patients, staff and other sources that now make us too accessible to everyone except ourselves, and our families.

I don’t have a solution to all of this, except to say that it is important to find ways to be efficient with “things”, because if we don’t, we are tempted to become efficient with people. With people we should strive to be effective, to make the most of every minute we have with them. We should not strive to shorten our time with the relationships in our lives but to make the most of what is often, too little time. Unless you can figure out how to manufacture more time in your day, this means reducing the time spent on other “things.” So, for this coming year, I will commit to standardizing and sorting through the “things” I need to do, to buy myself more time and energy to focus on making my time with people, with relationships more effective. It is in these relationships that I find a sense of moral healing. It is in relationships that I find connection and a sense of peace that things might just be okay.