Building the bridge between healthcare emergency management and daily operations

Healthcare emergency management continues to suffer from not being part of daily organisational operations. The aim of this paper is to shed light on a new paradigm for healthcare emergency management by viewing it in a distilled way: incidents that negatively affect the environment of care are simply deviations from normal. Doing so simplifies the approach and enables such work to meld more easily into the already complex healthcare clinical, operational and financial environs. Readers will take away knowledge on healthcare emergency management as deviations from normal operations, the goal being to aid in improving understanding and integrating such work into daily operations. The scope of this paper is a descriptive one of healthcare facilities, be they inpatient or outpatient, urban or rural and any combination of each.