| 7 August 2025
In the past 5 years alone, the UK healthcare sector has been faced with several significant emergencies that required rapid response. Take the COVID-19 pandemic for example – the NHS was hit incredibly hard. There were staff shortages, disruptions in patient care, and a backlog of treatments. The NHS redeployed staff and, as a last resort, sought retirees to return temporarily to support with the immense strain. It’s estimated that over 10 million patients avoided seeking care during the pandemic, leading to a huge backlog of treatments.
In the aftermath, when a new normality had resumed, the question became “how could we avoid this from happening again”? When we talk about resilience, we often think in terms of control and planning, being prepared, and understanding potential scenarios that could disrupt business continuity and impact patient safety. The reality is that it’s impossible to plan for every eventuality. True resilience isn’t about exhaustive foresight on what might happen and when, instead it’s about the ability to adapt to new situations.
What resilience really means
The recently released UK Government Resilience Action Plan states that “we are living through a period of profound change… the whole of the UK’s national resilience is being tested like never before”.
From maintaining critical care during IT outages, to supporting staff wellbeing in emotionally demanding environments, resilience takes many forms. At its core, it’s about having the capacity to adapt and recover quickly without loss of function in the face of change, whether expected or unexpected, big or small. Findings on how buisnesses recovered from the pandemic largely resonate with those from natural disasters, such as floods, storms, and earthquakes: Recovery tends to be hardest for small, locally focused businesses, especially those vulnerable to supply chain disruptions and market instability.
Resilience is often associated with having a plan for everything – being able to anticipate risk and having robust strategies in place to mitigate, often combined with a “predict and prepare” mindset. Strategic resilience is a crucial priority across the healthcare sector – and this is more about what capabilities and what capacity the organisation, the workforce, and the individual need.
The role of adaptability and flexibility in planning
Adaptability and flexibility are core components in resilience, found in many standards and guidelines, such as ISO 22336 and BS 65000. The Workforce Development Trust (parent group to Skills for Health) in partnership with the UK Resilience Academy, have developed The National Occupational Standards for Resilience and Emergencies. which similarly have a focus on the adaptive competencies needed by individuals. This set of standards have been designed to provide a comprehensive, structured national resource to be used in the development of the resilient workforce. They outline the knowledge, skills and understanding required to mitigate, prepare for, respond to and recover from risks and emergencies.
Effective resilience includes having the systems and people in place who can respond correctly, quickly and dynamically to emerging events. Resilience is not just about plans for specific scenarios, but about having well-prepared people, flexible systems, and the freedom to act when required.
When emergency plans help, and when they don’t
Emergency planning is of particular importance for events that are likely to happen or would have a high impact, such as cyberattacks, natural disasters, or a public health crisis. We can use existing data and evidence to model and predict these events and build robust plans to respond effectively – and better than we have in the past.
However, there are times where emergency plans alone will fall short, because we simply can’t predict and plan for every eventuality. This is where resilience concepts such as adaptability and redundancy come in – we need to make sure, for example, that as far as possible systems can keep running, that there’s access to enough staff with the right skills, that there is capacity (or the ability to introduce capacity) to deal with sudden fluctuations in service demand. These capabilities present an opportunity for where the healthcare system can focus on to improve their preparedness.
Planning for the unplannable
You can build a resilient workforce and organisation by investing in adaptive capacity, developing capabilities, and regularly assessing how prepared your people are to respond to disruption. Now is the time to consider whether your resilience efforts are focused more on prediction, or preparation to adapt.
At Skills for Health, we’re experts in workforce planning and emergency preparedness. We’ll help you assess where you are today, identify the skills and systems you’ll need tomorrow, and support you to build a stronger more resilient future.