Crisis Management in Healthcare: 5 Tips for Avoiding the Burning Platform
Healthcare is a rapidly evolving industry, which can bring many challenges to the operational stability of facilities nationwide. While it’s impossible to foresee every potential crisis before it happens, proper preparation is essential to minimize their impact. Crisis management in healthcare environments is key to preventing imminent, high-stake crises, sometimes described as burning platform scenarios.
Such events, which require healthcare leadership to make risky, drastic changes, have the potential for negative impacts on patient wellbeing. In this article, we’ll look at strategies for effective crisis management to help your facility avoid forced, urgent actions.
What Is Crisis Management in Healthcare?
For healthcare organizations, crisis management is a specialized set of actions that a facility can implement to mitigate the harm caused by unforeseen events. Effective crisis management is critical for healthcare organizations because human lives are on the line. There are various frameworks for crisis management strategies, including tactics presented by the Hospital Incident Command System (HICS) and general emergency preparedness principles.
Crisis Management and the Burning Platform Dilemma
When a disruptive event causes a high-stakes, critical juncture for a facility, the burning platform analogy is one lens through which to understand the crisis management and organizational change principles at work.
The original story involves crew members caught in an oil rig explosion who had faced the dilemma of staying on the platform or jumping into the ocean to survive. In a business context, this story parallels scenarios warranting drastic changes in leadership direction to avert company downfall.
When healthcare leaders are faced with an urgent crisis, this typically means that clinging onto old practices has placed patients in precarious situations and put their organization at risk of closure. In these situations, leaders are forced to stray from their status quo operations and take steps to save their organization.
The Importance of Crisis Management in Healthcare:Proactive Leadership and Robust Planning
While facing an urgent and imminent challenge can be a powerful motivation for leadership and staff to change, it also puts the organization and patients under their care at risk. Wherever possible, it’s best to avoid this critical juncture through proactive measures. In some cases, however, a crisis caused by an unforeseen event can’t be avoided. Having a robust crisis management plan in place for these scenarios may help a facility navigate worst-case consequences.
What Can Lead to a High-Stakes Crisis in Healthcare ?
Any type of business can be at risk of facing an imminent crisis, and healthcare facilities are no exception. There are generally three overlapping issues that can make facility leaders more vulnerable to crisis-driven decision making.
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Staffing Shortages |
Burnout is common among healthcare workers, which can lead to high turnover and staffing shortages. Sustained staffing shortages can also contribute to burnout, creating a cyclical issue if staffing is not made a priority. |
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Financial Constraints |
Without addressing staffing shortages, facilities must see fewer patients or risk compromising care quality. This can contribute to financial constraints, particularly for hospitals who still follow a fee-for-service model. |
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Care Fragmentation |
Without enough staff and financial resources to deliver quality care, patients often fall through the cracks of the care process. This lack of accessibility and care fragmentation speaks to a larger, more systemic shortcoming of the U.S. healthcare system. |
Example of a Crisis Scenario in Healthcare
The COVID-19 pandemic was a real-world example of how exacerbating these common issues can lead to an urgent crisis situation that requires forced, drastic changes within a system. During the pandemic, healthcare facilities were faced with a historically high demand for patient care, which broke the boundaries of an already short-staffed and under-resourced industry.
Facilities had no choice but to spend monumental costs on staffing reinforcements and additional care centers to prevent wide-scale deaths. Many patients were still unable to access care and dozens of hospitals were left bankrupt and at risk of closure post-pandemic.
5 Strategies for Effective Crisis Management in Healthcare
While COVID-19 was an unforeseen event, it exposed how failing to put out smaller fires ultimately led to a bigger disaster that forced facilities into taking drastic measures. To avoid similar dilemmas, healthcare leaders can take these steps to build a culture around prevention, rather than reaction.
1. Understand Your Facility’s Needs
It’s important to stay on top of what is and isn’t working for your facility. As a healthcare entity, finding the right balance between financial priorities and patient care goals can be key to your success. To avoid getting tunnel vision on financial earnings, comprehensively work to improve the quality of services that your operations grow from. You can take these steps to holistically assess the needs of your facility:
- Collect ongoing feedback from your staff.
- Conduct patient experience surveys.
- Regularly evaluate care outcomes and quality.
2. Proactively Address Existing Issues
Ignoring smaller problems at your facility can eventually snowball into bigger issues that may place you in a crisis situation. If you identify any barriers affecting your facility’s ability to deliver quality care, work to remove them in a timely manner. You can start by asking yourself questions that prompt proactive leadership initiatives:
- What’s the current problem and where is it stemming from?
- What’s the anticipated outcome if nothing is done to address the problem?
- Is this an opportunity to do things differently? What would be the result?
3. Keep Up With Industry Insights
Keeping up with the latest healthcare evidence and policies is an important way to ensure your facility isn’t falling behind. Health researchers and policy experts are constantly uncovering new ways to improve care delivery. Implementing these practices will help improve patient outcomes and sustain your operations.
Current best practices can also inform your crisis management plan. Unfortunately, healthcare organizations respond to disruptive events frequently and each event represents a learning opportunity for other facilities. To stay up to date with best practice standards and relevant policies, you can:
- Utilize resources from leading policy organizations, such as CMS and AHRQ.
- Regularly update hospital protocols to reflect evidence-based standards.
- Adopt clinical decision support tools to facilitate the delivery of evidence-based care.
4. Invest in Your Workforce
For healthcare facilities, the workforce is the backbone of care delivery. Without a fully functioning healthcare team, you can’t provide the services that your business is built off of. Be proactive about addressing and preventing staffing shortages before they become a prominent issue. You can implement these strategies to build a healthier workforce:
- Foster a positive work culture to prevent turnover.
- Build a long-term staffing strategy rather than finding temporary shift coverages.
- Optimize your float pool to better manage understaffing in nursing.
5. Embrace Necessary Change
As a facility leader, it’s important to remain adaptable to market shifts and innovations in the industry to strengthen your care delivery. Holding onto outdated practices can decrease your facility’s efficiency and increase your risk of facing crisis situations. Here are a few examples of ways you can embrace change:
- Focus on value-based care by moving away from fee-for-service payment models.
- Adopt new technology that will help streamline your care delivery and services.
- Follow best security practices by creating a network segmentation strategy.
Discover More Ways to Optimize Your Operations
Effective crisis management in healthcare involves proactively improving your organization’s care delivery, workflow, and culture. Don’t miss out on other free, useful tips and strategies that can help your healthcare facility flourish.