Operationalising resilience for disaster medicine practitioners: capability development through training, simulation and reflection

Abstract

Resilience has in recent decades been introduced as a term describing a new perspective within the domains of disaster management and safety management. Several theoretical interpretations and definitions of the essence of resilience have been proposed, but less work has described how to operationalise resilience and implement the concept within organisations. This case study describes the implementation of a set of general resilience management guidelines for critical infrastructure within a Swedish Regional Medical Command and Control Team. The case study demonstrates how domain-independent guidelines can be contextualised and introduced at an operational level, through a comprehensive capability development programme. It also demonstrates how a set of conceptual and reflective tools consisting of educational, training and exercise sessions of increasing complexity and realism can be used to move from high-level guidelines to practice. The experience from the case study demonstrates the value of combining (1) developmental learning of practitioners' cognitive skills through resilience-oriented reflection and interaction with dynamic complex open-ended problems; (2) contextualisation of generic guidelines as a basis for operational methodological support in the operational environment; and (3) the use of simulation-based training as part of a capability development programme with increasing complexity and realism across mixed educational, training and exercise sessions. As an actual example of a resilience implementation effort in a disaster medicine management organisation, the study contributes to the body of knowledge regarding how to implement the concept of resilience in operational practice.

Building Organizational Resilience Through Organizational Learning: A Systematic Review

“…Our findings also show that organizational learning is established through both formal and informal practices (see Gressgard and Hansen, 2015;Hecht et al, 2019;Hermelin et al, 2020;Orth and Schuldis, 2021)-and that formal practices are particularly associated with learning from failure (Hardy, 2014). Some studies find that formal practices ensure more thorough transfer of information, highlighting that disruption may undermine informal systems for knowledge exchange (Orth and Schuldis, 2021).…”

“…Chand and Loosemore (2016) point out that such experience can be acquired during real events, training exercises and drills. Several authors address the important role of training and exercises (e.g., Chand and Loosemore, 2016;Adini et al, 2017;Khan et al, 2017;Hecht et al, 2019;Hermelin et al, 2020;Tasic et al, 2020;Bhaskara and Filimonau, 2021), including the post-exercise debriefing session as learning-promoting activities that will enhance OR. Moreover, OR may be improved by experience and learning from accidents, with a focus on clear communication and common training to share experiences from "accidents, fatalities and good practices" (Johnsen and Habrekke, 2009, p. 8).…”

“…Learning from failures is among the key capabilities of a resilient organization (Herbane, 2019;Bhaskara and Filimonau, 2021); further, some (e.g., Madsen andDesai, 2010, cited by Manfield andNewey, 2018) have argued that organizations can learn more from failure than success, particularly on the case of major failures. There are also important lessons to be learned from successes (Hardy, 2014;Hermelin et al, 2020) and from reflecting on positive outcomes. Scholten et al (2019, p. 438) point out that organizations that do not "reflect on positive outcomes might inhibit organizations in seizing all the benefits of intentional experiential learning.…”

Prehospital major incident management: how do training and real-life situations relate? A qualitative study

“…The evaluation and feedback to participants in major incident training are often informal 30 or, as stated by the participants, focused on errors and shortcomings. By focusing on positive post-exercise debriefings 29 and by stimulating self-reflection during training, 31 professional experience and self-confidence can be better enhanced. In some organisations, video cameras or drone cameras are being used to document the scene and provide an overview of the situation.…”

Air Transport System Agility: The Agile Response Capability (ARC) Methodology for Crisis Preparedness

“…It combines this with an experiential approach, where participants gain experience from exercises and train the ability to be adaptive and respond to a range of partly unexpected circumstances. There has been a growing research interest in training organizations for agility or resilience, mostly focusing on which competencies or abilities should be trained and how training or exercises can stimulate these using simulation [20][21][22][23][24][25], rather than the scenario-based analytical approach that ARC constitutes.…”