Crisis management for surgical teams and their leaders, lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic; A structured approach to developing resilience or natural organisational responses

Abstract

Background: Multiple industries and organisations are afflicted by and respond to institutional crises daily. As surgeons, we respond to crisis frequently and individually such as with critically unwell patients or in mass casualty scenarios; but rarely, do we encounter institutional or multi-institutional crisis with multiple actors as we have seen with the COVID-19 pan-demic. Businesses, private industry and the financial sector have been in a more precar-ious position regarding crisis and consequently have developed rapid response strate-gies employing foresight to reduce risk to assets and financial liquidity. Moreover, large nationalised governmental organisations such as the military have strategies in place ow-ing to a rapidly evolving geopolitical climate with the expectation of immediate new chal-lenges either in the negotiating room or indeed the field of conflict. Despite both nation-alised and privatised healthcare systems existing, both appeared ill-prepared for the COVID-19 global crisis.

Methods: A narrative review of the literature was undertaken exploring the approach to crisis man-agement and models used in organisations exposed to institutional crises outside the field of medicine.

Results: There are many parallels between the organisational management of private business institutions, large military organisations and surgical organisational management in healthcare. Models from management consultancies and the armed forces were ex-plored discussed and adapted for the surgical leader providing a framework through which the surgical leader can bring about an successful response to an institutional crisis and ensure future resilience.

Conclusion: We believe that healthcare, and surgeons (as leaders) in particular, can learn from these other organisations and industries to engage appropriate generic operational plans and contingencies in preparation for whatever further crises may arise in the future, both near and distant. As such, following a review of the literature, we have explored a number of models we believe are adaptable for the surgical community to ensure we remain a dy-namically responsive and ever prepared profession.

Keywords: Covid; Crisis; Leadership; Management models; Naturalisation; Resilience; Surgeon eader.

Fig. 1

A roadmap from Respond to Thrive – helping the resilient surgeon navigate through the Recover phase (5).

Fig. 2

Remote readiness framework model for planning activities and services [6].

Fig. 3

Stakeholder management from Respond to Thrive (5).

Fig. 4

Working within a multi-institutional hierarchical framework.[11].

Fig. 5

Teams structure for crisis management [9].

Fig. 6

A simplified four quadrant approach to crisis management.

Fig. 7

The escalation curve (modified from Buron and Curtis) [15].