Restoring Humanity in Healthcare: Lessons from Laura Holford and Anu Gorukanti

Healthcare workers enter their roles with deep values and a desire to help others, yet many find themselves in systems that constrain their ability to act on those values. In this episode, Laura Holford and Anu Gorukanti explore how community, creativity, and spirituality give clinicians a way to restore agency and reconnect with their humanity.

The trio discuss moral distress, moral injury, and the heavy emotional load that comes with caring for people inside profit-driven institutions.

Laura and Anu describe how their work at Introspective Spaces creates room for vulnerability across hierarchy, rebuilds trust among clinicians, and strengthens the capacity to show up with presence.

Key Takeaways

• Moral injury affects many people in healthcare: Systemic constraints, understaffing, and inequities create powerlessness, isolation, and grief that clinicians often carry alone.
• Community care restores agency: Gathering across roles allows clinicians to see each other’s humanity and rebuild connection, trust, and collective strength.
• Creativity and spirituality support sustainability: Practices like the Artist’s Way help clinicians return to their values, slow down, and show up with integrity.
• Mutuality improves patient care: When clinicians tend to their own well-being, patient outcomes improve and the work becomes more sustainable.

Why This Episode Matters

Meaningful work requires environments where people feel connected, valued, and aligned with their purpose. This episode shows how collective care, shared reflection, and creative practice support real change. The conversation offers leaders and teams a model for building workplaces where humanity and healing can thrive.

About Our Guests

Laura Holford, RN MSN is an oncology certified nurse and public health nurse in Sacramento, California. She focuses on reducing nursing burnout and moral distress and works to rebuild accountability in healthcare. Laura draws on liberation theology and her background as a campus minister and lay community pastor. She helps people develop reflective and spiritual practices that support meaningful work and clear action.

Anu Gorukanti, MD is a pediatric hospitalist and public health advocate at a county hospital in Los Angeles. Her work centers on health equity, racial justice, and the role of contemplation in social change. Anu believes that clarity about personal values creates space for a more authentic life and more compassionate systems.

Resources to Learn More

• Introspective Spaces
• The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron
• Emergent Strategy by adrienne maree brown
• The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker
• The Wounded Healer by Henri Nouwen