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“It's soul destroying to be honest”: A qualitative study of morally uninhabitable working environments and the responsibilization of healthcare professionals working in concurrent disorders

2025· article· en· W4414491213 on OpenAlexafffundabout
Jackson Loyal, Ridhwana Kaoser, Craig Norris, Emily Jenkins, Sean O’Callaghan, Ruth Lavergne, Will Small

Bibliographic record

VenueSocial Science & Medicine · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldHealth Professions
TopicEthics in medical practice
Canadian institutionsDalhousie UniversityBritish Columbia Centre on Substance UseUniversity of British ColumbiaSimon Fraser UniversityFraser Health
FundersCanadian Institutes of Health ResearchMichael Smith Health Research BC
KeywordsHealth careThematic analysisReflexivityQualitative researchBurnoutDistressRedressPsychological intervention

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Healthcare professionals' wellbeing is crucial for healthcare system functioning and population health. Prolonged moral distress may result in burnout, undermining healthcare professionals' wellbeing, negatively impacting quality of patient care, and resulting in considerable healthcare system costs. We conducted 36 interviews with healthcare professionals working with patients with concurrent mental and substance use disorders in British Columbia, Canada, exploring their perceptions of the institutional constraints which shaped their experiences and caring practices. We conducted a reflexive thematic analysis of the interviews guided by the theoretical concept of responsibilization. While most participants found their work rewarding, many encountered institutional constraints which limited their ability to provide the standard of care to which they felt morally and ethically obligated. Prolonged exposure to such morally uninhabitable working environments resulted in participants' moral distress and burnout. Central to participants' narratives was the role of responsibilization in both contributing to and exacerbating moral distress and burnout. On top of their caring duties, participants perceived a need to over-function to offset institutional constraints within healthcare, and address their and their colleagues' moral distress and burnout without adequate institutional support. Findings demonstrate how individual-centered interventions are inadequate without proper institutional support, and have the potential to re-enact rather than rectify moral distress and burnout. Structural interventions are paramount to redress these occupational harms and protect healthcare professionals’ wellbeing. • Responsibilization drives moral distress and burnout in healthcare professionals • They must overcompensate to address institutional constraints • The act of overcompensating undermines their ability to provide care • This contributes to their experiences of moral distress and burnout • They must also address their moral distress and burnout due to limited supports

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.020
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.025
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Qualitative · Consensus signal: Qualitative
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.037
Threshold uncertainty score0.105

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0200.025
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.001
Bibliometrics0.0020.001
Science and technology studies0.0180.024
Scholarly communication0.0060.007
Open science0.0030.007
Research integrity0.0030.005
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0020.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.143
GPT teacher head0.563
Teacher spread0.419 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designQualitative
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

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Citations2
Published2025
Admission routes3
Has abstractyes

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