The Resilient Hospital: Adaptive Capacity, Crisis Leadership, and Organizational Survival in the Face of Health Emergencies

Abstract

Hospitals' capacity to withstand and recover from health emergencies has emerged as a critical concern in contemporary healthcare management. This descriptive study examines organizational resilience in hospital settings, focusing on adaptive capacity, crisis leadership, and the structural determinants of institutional survival during public health emergencies. Drawing upon a comprehensive review of recent literature published between 2018 and 2024, this paper synthesizes existing knowledge regarding how hospitals prepare for, respond to, and recover from large-scale health crises. The findings reveal that organizational resilience in hospitals is a multidimensional construct shaped by leadership effectiveness, workforce adaptability, resource flexibility, communication infrastructure, and institutional learning mechanisms. Crisis leadership, characterized by decisiveness, transparency, and distributed decision-making authority, emerges as a central determinant of hospital resilience. Adaptive capacity, defined as the ability to modify operational protocols and reallocate resources in real time, distinguishes hospitals that survive crises from those that experience systemic failure. The study concludes that resilience is not an inherent organizational trait but a cultivated capability requiring sustained investment in leadership development, staff training, technological infrastructure, and inter-organizational collaboration.