Organisational Resilience

Project summary

This research examines and evaluates the concept of organisational resilience within healthcare, focusing on infection prevention and control as a tracer issue. Our overall aim is to understand the factors relating to resilience, to assist healthcare organisations to make the cultural and system changes required to improve the safety of care delivered to patients, specifically infection prevention outcomes.

The concept of resilience has been explored in other research disciplines, such as psychology, ecology and information technology. Analogies have been drawn between resilience in these domains and organisational resilience, where resilience is understood as the ability of organizations to respond effectively to significant change over time. The research field, as it stands currently, is limited by the low number of empirical studies that exist. The majority of resilience research is theoretically focused, with an emphasis on describing frameworks or models that have yet to be tested. Given the intense national focus on infection prevention, this study will extend this research field using multimethods research at local and national level.

Aim

Our principle aim is to improve our understanding of the concept of organisational resilience in acute healthcare in the UK. The research will focus on the area of infection prevention and control. The research has the following objectives:

• A systematic understanding of the concept of organisational resilience in relation to infection prevention and control
• An examination of organisational resilience applied to a case study organisation
• An exploration of the impact of external agencies on organisational resilience
• Preparation, validation, pilot and UK rollout of an organisational resilience questionnaire relating to infection outbreak management in the UK acute hospital setting

Method

We are using a multi-method approach as outlined in the table below: