RESILIENCY PLANNING FOR THE HEALTHCARE COMMUNITY
In the 1950s Timex marketed their watches as having the ability to “take a licking and keep on ticking”. This simple slogan provides an insight into the core concept of resiliency planning, how an organization can endure after a disaster, how it can bend, not break. In a healthcare organization being resilient is critical given our mission, not only to our organization but to our entire community.
Healthcare organizations cannot stop natural hazards, have limited ability to prevent technological and human-caused hazards or plan for every disaster or disruption, but we can work and plan to minimize the disastrous consequences when these events happen. Resiliency planning denotes a holistic approach to ensure the organization bends in the face of disruptions rather than breaking. To be effective, resiliency has to be built into the very fabric of our organizations—from our culture, to how we organize and operate every day and how we plan for disasters.
Resiliency planning should lead us to design systems that fail gracefully not disastrously, prevent small failures from spiraling into system-wide failures, and ensure a timely response, and a speedy recovery. In the context of the healthcare community, bending and not breaking, to “take a licking and keep on ticking”, allows our organizations to continue providing care even as we absorb and then recover from a disaster.
Click the link below to learn more about how we can plan resiliency into our healthcare organization’s communication systems.
Sources:
–https://www.nist.gov/topics/community-resilience/planning-guide
-Resilience definitions, theory, and challenges: interdisciplinary perspectives -published in European Journal of Psychotraumatology 2014 Oct 1 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4185134/
Authors: Steven M. Southwick, George A. Bonanno, Ann S. Masten, Catherine Panter-Brick, Rachel Yehuda