Moral injury describes the damage to our moral compass and sense of self when the situation leaves us to make decisions that run against our values or moral beliefs. We might not recognize ourselves as morally injured, but we feel it, and it rarely feels good.

Narrative provides a creative space for appreciating and making sense of these experiences and, perhaps, providing a voice to moments that aren’t always easy to understand.

Led by physician-writer Jay Baruch, this workshop invites us to slow down and reflect on moments that reside in ambiguity. Through guided writing prompts and authentic group discussion, you will discover how the practice of intentional, reflective writing can help us understand complex experiences. You will also develop creative methods for preventing, supporting, and communicating situations of moral injury on individual and community levels.

Powerful things can happen when we put pen to paper and begin moving ideas across the page.

Learning Objectives

• Identify sources of moral injury in our professional practice
• Learn how narrative skills can provide different tools for understanding complex and messy experiences
• Develop creative methods for preventing, supporting, and communicating situations of moral injury on the individual and community levels

Instructor

Jay Baruch is a writer, emergency room doctor, educator, and Professor of Emergency Medicine at Alpert Medical School of Brown University, where he serves as the director of the Medical Humanities and Bioethics Scholarly Concentration. His academic and creative work centers on the complexity and uncertainty in patient care and the importance of creativity, interdisciplinarity, and the arts as clinical skills. His latest book of nonfiction essays is Tornado of Life: A Doctor’s Journey Through Constraints and Creativity in the Emergency Room (MIT Press 2022). He’s the author of two short fiction collections: What’s Left Out (Kent State University Press 2015) and Fourteen Stories: Doctors, Patients, and Other Strangers (Kent State University Press 2007).

He’s a former Director-at-Large, American Society for Bioethics and Humanities and the former medical humanities section chair for the American College of Emergency Physicians. In addition, he’s a former faculty fellow at the Cogut Institute for the Humanities at Brown University, where he directed the Creative Medicine Series and served on the leadership team for the Rhode Island Arts and Health group on practice, policy, and research.

His projects range from work with the Rhode Island School of Design Museum educators on museum-based curriculum to get clinicians to think about how they think, creating authentic spaces for fostering difficult conversations with the RISD Center for Complexity, and a Brown University EdX online course, “Beyond Medical Histories: Gaining Insight from Patient Stories.”

He serves on the steering committee for the Health Humanities Consortium and the AMA Journal of Ethics editorial board and received the inaugural Society for Academic Emergency Medicine Gold Humanism Award and the Brown Emergency Medicine Innovations in Education Award.

Fee

Program Fee: $385

All amounts are in Canadian Dollars (CAD) and are subject to 13% HST.

Accreditation

Continuing Professional Development (CPD), Temerty Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto, is fully accredited by the Committee on Accreditation of Continuing Medical Education (CACME), a subcommittee of the Committee on Accreditation of Canadian Medical Schools (CACMS). This standard allows CPD to review and assess educational activities based on the criteria established by The College of Family Physicians of Canada and the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada.

The Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada (Royal College) has established agreements with each of the American Medical Association (AMA), and the European Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (EACCME®) where activities approved for Royal College MOC Credits are eligible for conversion to AMA PRA Category 1 Credit™ and UEMS-EACCME European CME Credit (ECMEC®) credits, respectively.