Short of breath. Short staffed. Short on time. Short tempers. Short on supplies. The past two years have changed our world in ways we might not have wanted. But the reality is we now live with shortness as a norm. That includes research on how to manage these shortages.
Over the years, Heath Care Management Review (HCMR) has published key research by notable and emerging scholars that informed managers and executives on best practices for leading their health care organizations. But in the time of living short, much of that research feels in need of a refresh. The research on nurse and physician burnout that provided solutions to burnout now seems somehow inadequate. Managers and leaders are as burned out as staff, and the pool from which to hire has shrunk. The research on hospital governance and strategy generally took a longer view than most chief executives can envision as a stable future. The research on teamwork and collaboration could never have anticipated the extreme degree to which that became necessary and leaves us wondering whether or how to sustain the teamwork that emerged under duress. The few research reports on supply chain management that have been published in HCMR underestimated the globalness that underpins the running of health care organizations.
We are short on research that fits today's realities, as well as new or revised theory to explain the phenomena that arose from living short. Over the past two years HCMR has received an extremely high number of submissions focused on managing COVID-19 and other clinically focused work. Unfortunately, these papers do not fit the mission of HCMR to publish "state-of-the-art knowledge about management, leadership, and administration of health care systems, organizations, and agencies". Consequently, we still lack research that addresses the types of problems that managers and executives face in keeping the clinic, hospital or system running smoothly, effectively and efficiently.
We welcome, encourage, and look forward to seeing research and theory development that are relevant for the management and leadership of health care organizations of today and tomorrow. Such research might focus on more dynamic and resilient models of health care organizations, ones that recognize the need to adapt quickly and even frequently to rapidly changing and uncertain conditions. Likewise, we need research that can help us understand how people within these health care organizations make sense of these rapidly changing environments to help them effectively coordinate their efforts to maintain high-quality, cost-effective care. This research might also address the ways that health care leaders and practitioners respond to exogenous shocks that create short- and intermediate-term scarcity, in all of its forms, including time, staff, capital, and emotional bandwidth.
Living short may be our current reality but we believe that research that addresses some of these issues can help us catch our breath again.
Larry R. Hearld, PhD
Cheryl Rathert, PhD
Co-Editors-in-Chief
L. Michele Issel, PhD, RN
Associate Editor