The Ethics Hotline Is Confidential. Until You Use It.

Why institutional reporting systems punish the very honesty they claim to protect.

A few years ago, I said something in a meeting that made the air go still.

“People don’t actually feel safe filing ‘safe’ reports.”

I said it to a room full of leaders from the quality and safety team, the very people tasked with building trust and accountability.

They didn’t argue. They just didn’t believe me.

They pointed to the anonymous portal. The reporting dashboard. The “just culture” training modules. They cited infrastructure.

I cited clinicians who quietly chose strategic silence over institutional exposure. Who deleted reports mid-sentence. Who asked, not hypothetically, whether honesty was compatible with professional survival.

• Physicians whose attempts to report led to sham peer reviews and, ultimately, career attrition by design.
• Nurses removed from the ICU after mentioning a slow code that no one wanted documented.
• Managers whose devices were flagged for corporate surveillance by risk management after submitting a report labeled “anonymous.”

These weren’t disengaged employees. They were calculating the cost of being truthful inside a system that treats disruption as risk.

We were speaking different languages.

They were designing systems.
I was listening to people trying to survive them.

The erosion of trust in health care isn’t mysterious.

It’s the result of systems functioning exactly as designed.

We’ve built an institutional architecture that rewards silence, outsources ethics, and disciplines dissent. And we’ve done it all while claiming to center safety, transparency, and care.

I used to believe in institutional accountability. I sat on ethics committees. I helped draft policy. I encouraged people to report concerns through internal hotlines. I told them it was confidential. I thought it was.

It wasn’t.

The so-called “confidential” hotline logs IP addresses, device fingerprints, and login timestamps. The vendor is often a third-party firm, but the contract is owned by the institution. It doesn’t matter what the landing page says. The metadata routes inward.

In theory, raising a concern demonstrates professionalism. In practice, it’s treated more like an early warning sign.

Psychological safety, it turns out, is not a feeling. It’s a corporate deliverable.

Wellness programs, ombuds offices, and “just culture” initiatives are marketed as protective. In practice, they function more as containment architecture. They absorb ethical distress and neutralize reputational volatility. They offer support in language, not in consequence.

Just culture, in many systems, functions less as an ethical ideal than a liability buffer. It gives the appearance of introspection without the discomfort of actual accountability.

Burnout, in this light, isn’t exhaustion. It’s betrayal fatigue.

I work with physicians, professors, and professionals who no longer file reports. Not because they don’t care. Because they’ve learned what happens to the ones who do. They’re not disengaged. They’re conserving energy for self-preservation. They are, in the truest sense, documenting the problem in silence.

That institutional reality isn’t anecdotal. It’s architectural.

Here’s what rarely gets said:

• Confidential reporting is structurally unconfidential. The reporting pipeline is governed by the entity under scrutiny. The record is not neutral.
• Psychological safety is not a portal. Culture cannot be engineered through branding. Trust is not a UX problem.
• Mandatory reporting is a double bind. Clinicians are obligated to disclose risk, but disclosure itself becomes a liability, particularly in systems that treat suffering as instability.
• Ethics language is often prophylactic. Phrases like “transparency,” “due process,” and “just culture” function more as reputation management tools than moral commitments.
• Burnout is not diagnostic. It is descriptive of systemic indifference. The people we call “burned out” are often the ones who cared too much for too long without meaningful reciprocity.

Ask a former whistleblower. Ask the ones who were reassigned, discredited, or quietly pushed out. Ask the ones who were told their tone was the problem. Who were coached to be more collegial after disclosing preventable harm. Ask the ones who followed the steps, checked the boxes, and ended up on the wrong side of HR.

Of course, the hotline is confidential. Until you use it.

The problem isn’t that no one will speak up. The problem is that we taught them not to.

Originally published at https://kevinmd.com on July 24, 2025.

Dr. Jenny Shields is a licensed clinical psychologist and nationally certified healthcare ethics consultant. She is one of the few practicing psychologist-ethicists in the U.S., specializing in clinician mental health, moral distress, and systemic ethics in healthcare. Based in The Woodlands, Texas, she leads a private practice providing confidential therapy, consultation, and ethics education to physicians, nurses, and healthcare leaders across the country. She is affiliated with Oklahoma State University and writes regularly about the intersection of ethics, psychology, and professional integrity.