UC Irvine

Moral injury increasingly describes the distress nurses experience when systemic constraints prevent them from practicing in alignment with their professional values. Moral injury has been theoretically presented as an injury to one’s identity. Professional identity in nursing is “a sense of oneself in relationship to others” which results in an individual “thinking, acting, and feeling like a nurse.” This scoping literature review explores contemporary understandings of nursing professional or moral identity and the association between moral injury and identity among nurses in the United States.