Resilience engineering
Patient Safety
Definition. Resilience engineering studies how systems anticipate, monitor, respond to and learn from changing conditions so that they keep functioning under expected and unexpected demands.
Explanation
In health care it shifts attention from counting failures to understanding how staff adapt work to make things go right, moving from Safety-I to Safety-II (Patterson & Deutsch, 2015). Ethnographic work shows how hospital teams adapt when demand and capacity are misaligned (Sanford et al., 2025).
The approach complements, rather than replaces, traditional error analysis.
Related concepts
Safety-II High reliability organization (HRO) Human factors Health system resilience
Read on The Health Topics
- Understanding Safety Science: Key Theories & Frameworks
- Hospital Team Adaptation to Demand-Capacity Misalignments: An Ethnographic Study
References
Patterson, M., & Deutsch, E. S. (2015). Resilience engineering in healthcare: Moving from Safety-I to Safety-II. Safety Science, 79, 34-41.
Sanford, N., Lavelle, M., Markiewicz, O., Reedy, G., Rafferty, A. M., Darzi, A., & Anderson, J. E. (2025). Contextual influences on adaptation in four types of hospital teams: An ethnographic study. Applied Ergonomics, 128, 104529. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apergo.2025.104529
Cite this entry: Kurutkan, M. N. (2026). Resilience engineering. In The Health Topics glossary. https://healthtopic.org/glossary/resilience-engineering/
Articles that discuss this concept
4 articles on The Health Topics mention this concept. Most relevant first.
- Visual Representation of Sociotechnical System Paradigms: A Critical Evaluation of the Scoping Review by Bogna et al. (2026) 4
- Understanding Safety Science: Key Theories & Frameworks 1
- Hospital Team Adaptation to Demand-Capacity Misalignments: An Ethnographic Study 1
- A Meta-Theoretical Maturity Framework for Safety Science Research 1