Pandemic COVID-19, the High-Reliability Organization (HRO), and the Ecology of Fear

Abstract

COVID-19 has changed the social, financial, and political environments for healthcare. Healthcare organizations have abruptly changed operations for a new environment due to pervasive threats to the organization, patients, and healthcare professionals. While the direct, infectious presence of COVID-19 as a threat would seem to cause the greatest stress to the healthcare system, perhaps the absence of the threat may cause more severe and wide-ranging problems. Ecological studies demonstrate a greater decrease in prey populations from the predator’s absence due to an “ecology of fear.” By analogy, organizations share these trait responses and can develop an organizational culture of stress or stress. HRO describes functional traits for effective operations in environments of severe threat.

Common Sense High Reliability Organizing (HRO) in the Response to COVID-19

“…Organizational culture or leadership can sustain fear reactions that cause more damage to various processes than direct damage from the threat itself. This is the ecology of fear (42). How an organization processes information can also sustain fear responses.…”

The Nature of Neonatal Experience during Pandemic COVID-19

“…The RCP joined the group with a sincere desire to help. Rather, the RCP had incorporated into experience the extensional traits of HRO regarding the ecology of fear and the art of medical care (4,32). Experience as meaning.…”

“…We have entered a liminal space, a common if unrecognized experience in routine life and a characteristic of nonroutine life. The ecology of fear (32,34) creates widespread and unrecognized liminality. The fear of error, litigation, failure, etc., creates the liminal space, and, similar to liminality described in this article, there is no assured means to escape and no way out.…”

High-Reliability Organizing (HRO) and Abrupt Change from COVID 19: Failure of Scientific Rationality and Classical Logic

“…Error, unfortunately, has become an indicator of careless or poor performance to engender fear of the system and supervisors. The inability to neuromodulate the tive operations, creating the ecology of fear (11).…”

“…We can infer information in these situations. For that, we must ceptance and control of the feeling of fear (20), neuromodulation of stress-fear-threat (3), and social organizing to prevent the ecology of fear (11). Behaviors come in suites coordinated for various purposes (28,29).…”