DOI: 10.69554/vwqs8152 ISSN: 2397-1061

Equity as strategy: Addressing burnout and building resilient healthcare organisations

Natalie S. Dumont, Cheryl Green
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This article examines equity as a strategic organisational factor influencing workforce stability, patient safety ,and resilience in healthcare organisations. Drawing on industrial and organisational psychology, organisational behaviour, and healthcare leadership research, the article synthesises evidence on how inequitable workplace conditions, including mistreatment and microaggressions, information asymmetry, biased standards of competence, and tokenising hypervisibility, can contribute to organisational risk. The analysis identifies psychological safety, organisational justice, identity threat, and resource depletion as key mechanisms through which these conditions influence burnout, disengagement, and turnover intention, with downstream implications for staffing stability, operational costs, care quality ,and organisational performance. To integrate these relationships, the article introduces the Equity-Resilience Organisational Framework (EROF), a conceptual model linking systemic inequity exposures to psychological and social mechanisms, workforce instability, and organisational consequences. The analysis indicates that equity is most consequential when embedded within core organisational systems rather than addressed primarily through discrete or symbolic initiatives. Evidencealigned pathways include inclusive leadership development, equitable evaluation and promotion systems, transparent communication and information access, structurally focused workforce well-being policies, and accountability mechanisms linked to governance and executive performance. The article concludes that operationalising, measuring, and governing equity as strategic infrastructure can strengthen workforce stability, support patient safety ,and enhance organisational capacity to adapt under sustained operational strain. The EROF provides healthcare executives and governing bodies with a practical framework for diagnosing organisational risk, prioritising interventions, and evaluating their impact over time. This article is also included in The Business & Management Collection which can be accessed at https://hstalks.com/ business/.

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