Session 1: Moral Distress and Why It Matters

Anu Gorukanti, MD is a public health advocate and pediatric hospitalist at a county hospital in Los Angeles, CA who is passionate about health equity and racial justice. She went to undergraduate and medical school at Saint Louis University and completed her residency at Stanford University. She is passionate about social justice and the role that reflection and contemplation play as building blocks for revolution (as inspired by many theologians, spiritual leaders, and activists before her). She strongly believes that understanding who you are, what you value, and where your values come from can lead to a meaningful and authentic life. In her perspective, social change should always honor and incorporate both the individual and systems-based approach.

Laura Holford, RN MSN, is an oncology certified nurse and public health nurse committed to working to reduce nursing burnout and moral distress, and the reassembly of responsibility and accountability in healthcare. Liberation theology led her to train as a masters prepared nurse at University of San Francisco. She works as a community health nurse in Sacramento, CA She has a background as a campus minister & was lay community pastor of an Christian Interfaith church and she enjoys nothing more than accompanying people on their healing, reflective, and spiritual paths. Like many mystics before her, she believes that contemplation and action cannot be separated and finds herself naturally helping others’ build reflective, imaginative, and spiritual practices to ground their action and work in the world.

Sarah Warren, RN is a Dominican-American registered nurse, writer & activist who uses storytelling across social media & creative mediums to help humanize care. Sarah explores healthcare and humanity through critical analysis of oppressive systems to challenge us to build a just world together. Her lived experience and background growing up in an immigrant household shapes how she navigates spaces with an intense sense of justice and desire for systemic change.

She is the co-founder of 501c3 non profit Don’t Clock Out, a community organization dedicated to supporting healthcare workers through the impacts of moral distress. She can cook a mean sancocho, pollo guisado, moro con guandules or tres golpes. If you are a guest in her home, expect to be cared for in the ways she has been cared for all her life, through a strong passion for culture, intense love for humanity and understanding of shared joy through pain.