5 Ways to Build Resilience in Healthcare Emergency Management

When I discuss the concept of business continuity, I almost always talk about the four categories of major disruptions: workplace, workforce, information technology, and supply chain.

As planners, we readily consider workforce impacts such as pandemics and labor actions, but how thoroughly do your plans consider staffing shortages and their cascading effects? In an environment where we experience staffing shortages nationally, particularly in rural areas, we must take steps to ensure our current workforce is resilient.

HAP recently held its 2025 Workforce Summit with several speakers presenting perspectives relevant to Business Continuity and Organizational Resilience.

Ensuring resilience among our employees and contracted staff is more than just having a business continuity plan, it’s enacting measures to protect the well-being and safety of our employees from burnout and workplace violence.

When examining risks associated with social engineering or phishing, the concept of human performance must be considered. Staff that feels overworked, unhappy, and unsafe are likely to not feel invested enough to scrutinize attempts to access our networks or report concerning behaviors.

The summit’s keynote speaker discussed using artificial intelligence to support the workforce, not replace it. She highlighted astounding research results indicating those surveyed felt the most stressful part of their job was communicating with their supervisor and more than half (58%) of the respondents trusted a stranger more than their boss. As a security or emergency management professional, these results are concerning.

Some of the key takeaways from the conference and their relevance to business continuity and organizational resilience are as follows:

1. How You Communicate

Understand that your workforce is multi-generational, and we all send and receive communications differently.

Ensure your communications around business continuity, physical security, emergency management, and cyber resilience take this into consideration when communicating plans, training, and feedback.

2. Building Trust

If respondents to a survey are more likely to trust a stranger than their boss, do your security/resilience plans have sufficient pathways to voice workplace concerns around behavior, workplace violence, or other risks?

3. What does your team need?

About 71 percent of nursing homes use agencies to supplement their workforce, and likely many other organizations use agencies or outsourcing mechanisms for support.

You need strategies for resiliency for staffing agencies. What training do supplemental employees receive around cyber and physical security risks? Are you collaborating with human resources and staffing personnel to evaluate and address these types of risk?

4. Technology and staffing shortages

Increasingly health care is turning to technology to help mitigate impact from staffing shortages; it’s important to ensure our continuity, security, and resilience programs are keeping pace. 

The use of AI and other technology to manage open shifts could save organizations money and time, and streamline a process that is often manual. This can leave some health systems competing for open shift coverage between campuses or having disparity.

Similarly, using “digital nursing” could enhance care by alleviating some administrative burden. When using technology planners should consider downtime strategies and workarounds to ensure continuity of care and related risks.

5. Addressing violence in health care

A panel of health care professionals addressed current trends and challenges regarding workplace violence. Some of the best practices discussed included: establishing a process to “flag” high-risk patients in medical record systems; establishing a culture of “zero” harm that includes employees and patients; leadership sponsorship of prevention programs; addressing workplace violence prevention skills such as de-escalation and non-verbal cues in clinical training and education curriculum.

Bottom line

“The Workforce is Human” and essential to our resilience as organizations, particularly for Healthcare Emergency Management. In challenging times where staffing shortages are severe, we must ensure our continuity and security programs address risks to our current workforce. For additional insights, don’t hesitate to contact me for more information.

By: Edward Wurster, III, HAP manager, business continuity and cyber resilience