Fran Griffin, RRT, MPA

Resilience in healthcare means that organizations are continually ready to navigate disruptions of any size without sacrificing quality of care or patient and staff safety. Health systems maintain resilience by embedding the principles of high reliability into their culture, workflows, and processes. These high-reliability organizations (HROs) don’t approach reliability as a short-term project or checklist; rather, they embed the principles into every interaction and action beginning with senior leadership. As a result of a practice, not project, approach to reliability, HROs “rarely fail even though they encounter numerous unexpected events,” as authors Karl Weick and Kathleen Sutcliffe explain in their book series, “Managing the Unexpected.”