What a pandemic reveals about learning in health care organizations

ABSTRACT

[...]many health care providers are facing an environment where learning is essential, but intimidating, and where both formal and informal avenues for gathering information and sharing expertise are impeded. [...]in our own work with health care providers responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, we have seen hospitals creating new roles to facilitate the dissemination, updating, and enforcement of best practices across different units or locations (e.g., the implementation of a “safety officer” to share best practices and monitor usage of personal protective equipment by different care providers). The learning characteristics we see in health care organizations responding to the COVID-19 pandemic—the need to manage fleeting, ever-changing knowledge that resists formalization and documentation but is also difficult to observe or share informally due to outside constraints—are likely representative of the kind of challenges all organizations will increasingly face in the future, and we invite organizational scholars to explore them further in order to build a more robust and nuanced understanding of learning in modern organizations. * Corresponding author.