Resilient health care

Health care is everywhere under tremendous pressure with regard to efficiency, safety, and economic viability - to say nothing of having to meet various political agendas - and has responded by eagerly adopting techniques that have been useful in other industries, such as quality management, lean production, and high reliability.

This has on the whole been met with limited success because health care as a non-trivial and multifaceted system differs significantly from most traditional industries.

In order to allow health care systems to perform as expected and required, it is necessary to have concepts and methods that are able to cope with this complexity.

Resilience engineering provides that capacity because its focus is on a system?s overall ability to sustain required operations under both expected and unexpected conditions rather than on individual features or qualities.

Resilience engineering?s unique approach emphasises the usefulness of performance variability, and that successes and failures have the same aetiology.