“Are you just a human being like the rest of us?” Leveraging the concept of human finitude to mitigate clinician moral distress and promote moral resilience.

Abstract: Human finitude, defined broadly as being created with limits and boundaries, directly informs the work of clinical ethics, even as it is rarely identified and explored. This paper illuminates 4 ways the concept of human finitude is leveraged in unit-based ethics case conferences (UBECs) to mitigate clinician moral distress and promote moral resilience: 1. To normalize competing values and ethical frameworks among the interprofessional care team; 2. To transform moral regret into self-compassion; 3. To create acceptance for the non-rational, experiential, and socio-economic dimensions of being human that inform and, often unconsciously, drive decisions and actions of patients and families; 4. To orient the team to larger social forces beyond their control in order to invite critical reconsideration of the scope of moral responsibility for individual patient outcomes without undermining moral agency and accountability.

The presenter is an ethicist who directs a robust clinical consultation practice (~450 formal consults/year) in an urban academic medical center that also boasts a dedicated program of UBECs and moral distress consultations to support clinician well-being. Qualitative analysis of surveys capturing the impact of these initiatives as well as de-identified cases where an ethics debrief was held will be used to demonstrate the usefulness of human finitude as a heuristic and therapeutic tool.