Healthcare Systems Resilience: Analysing Failure, Driving Change, and Sustaining Improvement
This course examines healthcare organisations as complex adaptive systems in which outcomes arise from dynamic interactions among people, technologies, processes, and environments.
Over three structured days, the course develops advanced analytical, design, and evaluative competencies relevant to patient safety, quality improvement, and organisational learning. Day one focuses on problem identification, introducing systems thinking, human factors, and resilience engineering frameworks to move beyond linear causal models toward richer system level interpretations. Day two addresses enacting change, guiding participants in the design of context appropriate, evidence informed interventions that reflect real world organisational complexity. Day three centres on evaluation and sustainability, enabling participants to critically appraise impact, surface emergent effects, and develop strategies for embedding resilience and maintaining improvement.
New pilot course for 2026-2027
We are excited to be developing this new pilot short course for the 2026-2027 programme. Initially pilot courses are only open to a limited number of University of Bristol staff and postgraduate research students, who provide detailed feedback in exchange for early access to the course.
Please bear with us whilst we update this course webpage with full course details.
| Dates | 28-30 April 2027 |
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| Fee | £0 |
| Format | Online |
| Audience | Open to a limited number of University of Bristol staff and postgraduate research students only (prerequisites apply). |
| Organisers | Dr David Grant |
Course profile
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Please ensure you meet the following prerequisites before booking:
| Eligibility | This course is available to University of Bristol staff and postgraduate researchers only. Candidates must be able to fully attend the course and provide feedback. |
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| Conditions |
Pilot courses are extremely popular and all live sessions must be attended in full. You should only book onto this course if you are able to commit to attending in full and have time to provide detailed feedback. Attendance is monitored. Failure to attend in full, without a valid reason, will result in your access to pilot course materials being rescinded and you will not be permitted to attend any further pilot courses within the same academic year. |
Before booking this course, please make sure you read the information provided above about the target audience and prerequisites. It is important that you have access to the relevant IT resources needed for the course and meet the knowledge prerequisites to ensure you can get the most from the course.
Bookings are taken via our online booking system, for which you must register an account. To check if you are eligible for free or discounted courses please see our fees and voucher packs page. All bookings are subject to our terms & conditions, which can be read in full here.
For help and support with booking a course refer to our booking information page, FAQs or feel free to contact us directly. For available payment options please see: How to pay your short course fees.
Participants are granted access to our virtual learning platform (Blackboard Ultra) 1 to 2 weeks in advance of the course. This allows time for any pre-course work to be completed and to familiarise with the platform.
To gain the most from the course, we recommend that you attend in full and participate in all interactive components. We endeavour to record all live lecture sessions and upload these to the online learning environment within 24 hours. This allows course participants to review these sessions at leisure and revisit them multiple times. Please note that we do not record breakout sessions.
All course participants retain access to the online learning materials and recordings for 5 months after the course.