Learning from crisis is the final component in crisis management. Once an organization’s goal is achieved, the crisis team ought to analyze how the organization performed in a crisis. The management team attempts to learn from what worked and what never worked in managing crisis. What worked in crisis management is retained while what failed is replaced with other effective strategies (James, 2011). This helps leaders in future preparedness. Crisis analysis helps the management team in determining whether there are any loopholes in crisis management plan. They are also able to evaluate how employees perform their respective roles. The following section will use hospital and military examples of how leaders can learn from crisis.
The hospital is one of the key organizations where learning from crisis is very imperative. Hospital administrators should identify signals and respond to the impending events precisely. Ignoring the signals may lead to future hospital crisis and extension of the influence to the entire system. In order for hospitals to thrive in times of crisis, their leaders should develop effective environmental scanning skills and methodologies to identify the signals. A leader’s ability to predict and anticipate potential crisis in hospitals requires having critical skills in strategic planning. Hospitals and health systems have an excellent way of developing crisis plans. These plans have proven to be significant prototypes in managing hospital crisis. Some hospitals even have crisis preparedness strategies that are nurtured to help them respond to crisis.
In this era where technological and therapeutic change is fast, it is no longer an option for hospitals to anticipate and prepare for obvious risks. There must be a well-written crisis preparedness plan that focuses on the life of the hospital as well as its workers. Thus, learning from previous crisis ensures that exercises being carried by the medical practitioners are up to date and conform to the current global health system. For example, crisis on drug administration is one of the greatest challenges in today’s hospitals. Hospitals have now adopted a technological system known as bar coding. This is a technological intervention aimed at reducing the rate of medical administration errors whereby nurses are disallowed from administering medications to patients without following a documented order. In this system, any moment a physician orders medication, the order is transmitted to the pharmacy where a code for the order is generated. Thereafter, the pharmacist verifies the order and medication is sent to the nurse who administers it to the patient after scanning the bar code against the patient’s identification information. This system was developed due to past crisis in medicinal administration (Barlow, 2014).
The military is another sector where learning from the previous crisis is very important. Not all military operations are successful. For example, a crisis such as lack of funds during a humanitarian relief mission may hinder the officers from incorporating their best practices and tracking information for humanitarian relief. As the money runs low and the mission and its workers fail into the background, it is likely that this crisis event may go unnoticed hence causing problems in future military missions. To ensure that the military personnel learn from this crisis, it becomes important to record the crisis. Additionally, after the mission is over, they should cross reference the same to determine where improvements and greater efficiencies can be made (Gyimah-Brempong, 2002). Further, research on performance management and indicators is required to ensure loopholes in the mission are noted. Without performance standards, the humanitarian relief troop will have no means to gauge their success and no reference for making their missions better.
To learn effectively from crisis, there should be collection of data from a variety of sources. This will include looking at the military and hospital records kept during crisis management, observing and interviewing those that were involved in the exercise. Learning helps military and hospital administrators in preparing for future crisis management. Completion of a risk management practice can help uncover weak crisis team managers as well as crisis management flaws. Learning from crisis does have communication challenges. Leaders may withhold negative information that may prevent the entire workforce from performing effectively. This process should be purely used for service improvement purposes and blame game should be shunned.
References
Barlow, R. (2014). Bar codes earning their stripes. Web.
Gyimah-Brempong, K. (2002). Researching military expenditures in Africa: findings and lessons from researchers. Web.
James, H. (2011). Learning from crises. Web.