Das Krankenhaus als lernende Organisation während der Pandemie: Herausforderungen und Learnings

This article addresses the extraordinarily high organizational demands on a university hospital during the pandemic. Healthcare provision for the population and responsiveness as an employer for employee security require the capacity to act as a learning organization with high organizational resilience. In the pandemic, the nursing profession assumes a key role in the entire hospital organization. Therefore, it is highly relevant that organizational learning and organizational resilience are visible and sustainably realized in practice. Hospitals have an advantage over other organizations. They are familiar with handling „extraordinary situations“. In the clinical context, concepts such as organizational preparedness or disaster preparedness have been relevant already before the pandemic. Against this background, the current article describes how pandemic-related experiences in the context of university nursing care may become catalysators of organizational development: more agile forms of working, flattened hierarchies, intensified communication and reinforced interprofessional cooperation become possible. Based on the example of a Swiss university hospital, this article is focused on the following five major challenges and associated learnings: (1) “ensuring more agile forms of organizing and collaborating”, (2) “proactively ensuring nursing care”, (3) “facilitating cohesion by means of communication and participation”, (4) “being a leader who is conveying safety in the midst of insecurity”, (5) “sustainably fostering a resilient and caring organization”.