Resilience in a prehospital setting - a new focus for future research?

Handling and initiating of treatment in a prehospital setting are complex processes that involve many treatment options and include several parts of the chain of survival. Capacity to adapt to unexpected changes in the patients’ conditions or in the surroundings is a prerequisite for patient safety. Outside the healthcare sector, safety science is moving from an approach focused on the analysis and management of error (Safety I) to instead understanding the inherent properties of safety systems (Safety II). In healthcare the attention to why service providers are able to succeed under challenging conditions remains sparse. The aim of this commentary is to give a better understanding of how the concept and inclusion of resilience can inspire a new approach for future research in prehospital settings. So far, most resilience studies have been conducted in emergency departments while the role of contextual factors and adaptations in a prehospital setting has remained unexplored.

In contrast to traditional research on healthcare quality and safety, which tends to focus on failures, resilience research is interested in examining the overwhelming majority of healthcare processes with successful outcomes, to determine how high-quality patient care is generated. Resilience is conceptualized as a proactive ability to adjust to potentially harmful influences and challenges rather than to resist them. To better understand and promote resilience, there is a need to explore the underlying mechanisms of adaptation, trade-offs and improvisation that occur in the emergency chain. Attention to how people respond to disruptions, challenges and opportunities is vital. There are factors, recognized and unidentified, influencing adaptation, trade-offs and improvisation. Influencing factors at different levels could be of particular value to increase knowledge to better understand resilience in a practical perspective. As prehospital work conditions are highly unpredictable and diverse, learning through everyday work could be of great value if the experiences are transferred and integrated in training and simulation.

Empirical research is of crucial importance to build and support resilient systems and processes in a prehospital setting. We need a new framework and a new approach to how research on this topic is conducted and to support resilient performance. This should involve identifying factors that promote resilience, both on individual-, team- and system- levels.