Crisis management checklist: lessons learned from the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic

“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” Never has this quote, uttered in response to a challenger’s reported plan to take the title away from heavyweight champion Mike Tyson, rang truer than in the past 20 months as the global population wrestles with the fallout on the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. While countless lives were disrupted both directly and indirectly during this time, members of the medical community bore the brunt of this fallout in their personal lives while being asked to perform above capacity in their professional lives simultaneously. Compounding this experience was the fact that injuries, illness, and death from other causes did not halt leaving many in the medical community, and community at large, to face personal tragedies in addition to the pandemic. Our goal is to create a series of discussions using the perspective of our surgical department that faced not only the fallout of the pandemic, but also the unexpected death of an influential mentor/physician and close family member to the department. Unfortunately, this pandemic is not the only time tragedy has struck a surgical department. For example, Louisiana State University and Hurricane Katrina in 2007, and a plane crash killing members of the University of Michigan transplant team. However, the pandemic is certainly the most globally widespread, relevant and recent. We leverage crisis-management strategies from other fields, responses from an internal survey, and thoughts from our surgical team on what worked during these crises, what did not, and how we can begin to create a strategic response for those unexpected moments where you get “punched in the mouth.”