April 2023 HRO Theme of the Month is aligned to the HRO Principle “Commitment to Resilience.”

“Commitment to Resilience”

Dear Colleagues,

April’s HRO Theme of the Month is Commitment to Resilience. Commitment to resilience is the ability to bounce back from mistakes, as well as having the ability to accommodate change. Having a commitment to resilience allows us to absorb shocks to the system and continue forward. This is especially important in healthcare, as we work in a complex and continually changing environment.

VA Sunshine Healthcare Network’s number one goal as a High Reliability Organization is Zero Harm. We recognize that everyone makes mistakes and unexpected events occur on a daily basis. Resilience allows us to learn and recover from those events.?

The commitment to resilience implies that the organization’s management and culture have the proper attitude toward unexpected conditions or failures. It emphasizes the central point that High Reliability Organizations are not organizations that do not experience failure. Rather, they continue to generate the main outcomes of their mission despite failures. It means we share lessons to avoid future events.

To adapt to something unexpected, the people in the organization are ready to recognize the event for what it is, avoid complacent assumptions, and refuse to oversimplify or routinize the problem before an effective solution is identified. This is a capacity that organizations with a commitment to resilience will develop over time.

Workers in resilient organizations will create innovative responses to failures as needed, almost improvising in real time. However, they are not working in an unstructured system when they do this. They need to have both exhaustive expertise regarding the portion of the organization affected by an event and the confidence to act. This response is empowered from all levels of the hierarchy.

Over the past several years we have experienced amazing examples of healthcare resilience. Let’s continue this commitment to resilience beyond the pandemic.

7 Strategies to Build a More Resilient Team

Link to Article: 7 Strategies to Build a More Resilient Team

• Key Takeaways:
• Article outlines strategies to build resilient teams.
• The coronavirus pandemic revealed the necessity of resilient teams — as well as which teams didn’t have the necessary skills.
• Resilience requires a level of self-awareness and empathy that may not come naturally to all team members.
• Leaders must assess the state of their teams, identify weak spots and then deliver strategies that will help team members break down barriers and build foundations of trust, transparency and self-awareness.
• The article offers seven practices to help foster team resiliency.
• Read time: ~ 10 minutes

Building Organizational Resilience

Link to Article: Building Organizational Resilience

Key Takeaways:

• Article focuses on how organizations can build their resilience in order to cope—and thrive—in uncertain times, by developing scripted routines, simple rules, and the ability to improvise.
• The writers describe their lessons learned from their experience during an expedition to Mount Everest.
• They then advocate for leaders to apply their hypothesis to their organization's own resilience toolkit.
• Read time: ~ 10 minutes

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DAVID ISAACKS, FACHE