Organizational Resilience in Healthcare: A Scoping Review

Healthcare organizations have always faced challenges, yet the past decade has been particularly difficult due to workforce shortages, the COVID-19 pandemic, and economic demands, all of which can impact quality of care. While some healthcare organizations have demonstrated the ability to adapt to such stressors-which has been termed "organizational resilience"-others have not. Most of the research on resilience in healthcare has been on individual clinicians; less is known about how extra-individual groups such as teams, units, and systems develop resilience. Understanding what organizational resilience is, how to measure it, and how healthcare organizations can develop it is essential to responding effectively to future acute and chronic stressors in the healthcare industry. The purpose of this scoping review is to synthesize how organizational resilience is defined and measured in the current healthcare literature and to inform future interventions to improve organizational resilience.

We searched PubMed and Scopus databases for articles mentioning organizational resilience in healthcare. Eligible sources were those published in English through December 2023 in any format, and that described or measured organizational resilience in healthcare. Titles and abstracts were screened, and information was extracted from eligible articles.

We screened 243 articles and included 97 in our review. Across these studies, organizational resilience was described as a healthcare system's ability to continue functioning and meet its objectives when exposed to stressful stimuli. Reactive and proactive strategies, as well as reflection, were identified as key components of organizational resilience. Four measures of organizational resilience were developed for use in healthcare, but only two have been validated.

Future studies should focus on validating and comparing existing measures of organizational resilience and using them to investigate how organizational resilience may impact quality of care and clinician well-being, allowing the field to move beyond the focus on individual clinician resilience.