“Free Fall” – A Case Study of Resilience, Its Degradation, and Recovery in an Emergency Department

Emergency Departments (EDs) are open systems that routinely cope with highly variable and uncertain inputs. This paper will use two critical incidents to explore worker adaptations to complexity and unpredictability, and the organizational interpretation of threats to performance. We use the concept of resilience state space and state transitions to analyse the ED’s response to chronic constraints and unexpected shocks.