By Rebecca Farrington, Louise Tomkow, Gabrielle Prager, and Kitty Worthing.
Healthcare professionals are increasingly expected to be hardy and ‘suck it up’ to survive in complex and demoralising workplaces. As NHS clinicians, we saw staffing shortages and limited resources firsthand during the COVID-19 pandemic. These experiences magnified our scepticism about the onus on us, as individuals, to be ‘resilient’ as a solution to both the workforce crisis and wider societal problems.
Our paper ‘In critique of moral resilience’ describes the responses of NHS staff faced with navigating COVID-19 and caring for one of the most disadvantaged groups in our society – people seeking asylum housed in contingency accommodation. The staff we interviewed provided a social commentary on the state-sponsored neglect of vulnerable migrants in the UK. We don’t overlook this, but we focus on healthcare professionals’ understanding, responses and negotiation of their roles in this ‘Hostile Environment’.
Resilience was clearly important to staff for self-preservation, but so was an ability to see the limits of a biomedical approach to social suffering. The concept of moral resilience helped to unpick this but was not enough to describe the ideological changes and challenges to systems made by staff using their new insights. They did put up with the difficult bits of their work, and we describe how they survived. However, these coping actions alone did nothing to change the status quo in the political and social systems causing the underlying health problems. Some staff we interviewed made positive changes in the lives of the people seeking asylum through activism to improve their health and wellbeing. We found that the concept of resilience failed to capture these important moral actions: advocating beyond the clinic, beyond just doing their best on the job.
The popular focus on resilience is here to stay in much of our work and home lives, but we encourage caution in using it as a broad-brush solution to complex problems. Healthcare providers who see and yet continue morally problematic care in the name of resilience might be thought of as complicit in social suffering. Does moral resilience just promote acceptance of the status quo, even when it feels unbearable? What cost does this fixation on resilience bring to both care providers and patients?
Reflecting on our work in clinical medicine, research, and medical advocacy, we recognise that some of our most effective improvements to social conditions have been through collective action and joint resistance. In times of increasing moral outrage, such as against the UK government’s illegal migration bill, this feels a more appropriate response than just sucking it up in the name of resilience in the hope that we will survive.
Authors: Louise Tomkow1, Gabrielle Prager1, Kitty Worthing2, Rebecca Farrington1
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