Resilience practices and patient safety: a multiple case study

Resilience capacity/behaviour is receiving more and more attention within the Operations Management academic and practitioner community because of the general awareness regarding the impossibility to prevent any kind of failure/disaster that may occur in whatever work system. However, in healthcare operations management domain there is a deep “lack of knowledge” about resilience practices, even if few studies on similar concepts, such as the work-around practices, have already been conducted. In this paper we describe 13 cases of resilience practices that we found to be implemented within an Italian hospital and we analyse them through the lens of operational failure literature and supply chain resilience literature. This multiple case study allow us to identify, define and categorize the resilient practices adopted within healthcare work systems, and to check their efficacy, policy compliancy and enforceability.