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Healthcare organizations worldwide were badly hit by the “surprise” of the pandemic. Hospitals in particular are trying hard to manage problems it caused, searching for solutions to protect the health of citizens and reorienting operations. The implementation of resilience solutions in the coping phase and the ability to react promptly and redefine activities is essential. Integrating crisis management and resiliency literature, this paper discusses how health organizations were able to cope with adversity during the crisis.

The research is conducted through a case study of a large Italian hospital, the Gemelli Polyclinic Foundation, which was one of the leading hospitals in the Italian response to the pandemic.

The case reports actions taken in order to continue functioning and to maintain core activities despite severe adversity. The overall response of the Gemelli was the result of the three types of response: behavioral (effective leadership), cognitive (rapid resource reallocation) and the contextual reinforcement (multiagency network response). The authors highlight how an integrative framework of crisis management and resiliency could be applied to healthcare organizations in the coping phase of the pandemic. The experience of the Gemelli can thus be useful for other hospitals and organizations facing external crises and for overall improvement of crisis management and resilience. Responding to crisis brings the opportunity to make innovations introduced during emergencies structural, and embed them moving forward.

The paper focuses only on the coping phase of the response to the pandemic, whereas building long-term resilience requires understanding how organizations accumulate knowledge from crises and adapt to the “new normal.”

The paper responds to the call for empirical studies to advance knowledge of an integrative framework of crisis management and resiliency theories with reference to complex organizations such as healthcare.

In this paper, the two main approaches employed up to now in quality‐related surveys, namely the technique‐oriented and the activity‐oriented ones, are discussed, showing their relative advantages and weaknesses. Then, a new method of surveying quality management, based on the analysis of quality‐related information flows, is presented and discussed. In order to illustrate the comparative advantages of this new measure‐oriented approach, some results from a field survey on Italian white goods manufacturers are discussed. Results provide evidence on the power of the new approach here presented to disclose new aspects of quality management that could have been overlooked by other approaches. Moreover, it is shown that the new approach is considerably more efficient than others in terms of time consumption for the data collection phase with respect to the depth of information collected.