| 19 May 2026
Case study: North Yorkshire Local Resilience Forum
Healthcare organisations are having to operate in an increasingly complex environment – from infrastructure disruption to workforce pressures and rising demand. Ensuring that systems can respond effectively under pressure requires more than strategic awareness. It requires a clear, shared understanding of how organisations would work together in practice when disruption unfolds.
The North Yorkshire Local Resilience Forum (NYLRF), covering North Yorkshire and the City of York, partnered with Skills for Health’s parent organisation, The Workforce Development Trust, to pilot the Scenario Informed Resilience Assessment (SIRA). Their aim was to understand how prepared partners really were to respond together during a fast-moving disruption. While the case study sits outside the health sector, the insights are highly relevant to healthcare organisations as it demonstrates how SIRA can surface real‑world strengths, gaps, and interdependencies across a multi‑agency system.
The challenge
While NYLRF had already engaged strategic leaders around key risks, they wanted to go further and bring operational practitioners and business continuity leads together to test how strategy translated into action on the ground. They needed to understand:
- How would information be accessed and shared under pressure?
- How well would organisations coordinate when disruption escalates?
- Where did confidence and capability vary across the organisation?
These challenges mirror those faced across the NHS and healthcare, where operational realities, workforce pressures, and interdependencies can significantly influence how well organisations respond during disruption.
The solution
SIRA combines an assessment of organisational readiness with an immersive, facilitated scenario exercise. For NYLRF, this included a large-scale power outage scenario, designed to reflect realistic risk and introduce increasing pressure over time. The delivery was supported by the Resilience Advisors Network, whose operational expertise and advocacy helped strengthen the exercise and champion the value of SIRA across the resilience community.
The facilitation team combined workforce expertise with emergency response and multi‑agency resilience experience, ensuring the exercise reflected both organisational realities and system‑wide coordination.
This approach is directly transferable to healthcare, where resilience depends on:
- Workforce mobilisation
- Continuity of critical services
- Access to essential information
- Coordination across organisational boundaries
The Impact
What emerged was a clearer, shared picture of resilience across the partnership. Strengths were highlighted, variation in preparedness was revealed and practical challenges were surfaced, all of which wouldn’t have appeared in a standard assessment or tabletop exercise. The process also provided a strong evidence base to support honest conversations, clearer priorities and immediate action.
Read the full case study to explore what NYLRF learned, how partners responded under pressure and how SIRA supported more coordinated, system-wide resilience.
Why this matters for healthcare
Healthcare systems are inherently interdependent. A disruption in one part of the system (power, digital infrastructure, workforce availability, supply chain) can rapidly cascade across services.
For organisations looking to strengthen their preparedness, SIRA provides a practical, scalable approach that reflects real‑world pressures and workforce realities.
Read case study