Article Text
Abstract
When organisations encounter a crisis, the most senior executives are at the spotlight and have responsibility to lead the organisation to safe grounds. This necessitates mental focus to instill confidence and resilience to staff, customers and external stakeholders. In August 2015, a large medical centre in the Saudi Arabia faced a major outbreak with the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV), and cases accumulated in an unprecedented rate, triggered by a hospital-acquired transmission in the overcrowded Emergency Department. This article summarises the leadership learning from the MERS-CoV outbreak and draws on principles from leadership in extremis studies, a perspective that emphasises specific personality traits, attitudes and styles of individual leaders. It describes phases of the crisis starting with the phase 1 of crisis escalation, which included the emergency response along with measures for building confidence and ending with phase 2 of crisis resolution in which the crisis is used to make permanent and lasting change.
- leadership
- MERS-CoV
- Delivery of Health Care
- Chief Executive Officer
- hospital
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Footnotes
Contributors This is a personal reflection from the corresponding author as a healthcare CEO in a major healthcare disaster. He is responsible for the overall content of this article.
Funding The authors have not declared a specific grant for this research from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.
Competing interests None declared.
Patient consent Not required.
Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.