Surge management is important to hospital operations, yet surge literature has mostly focused on the addition of resources (e.g., 25% more beds) during events like pandemics. Such views are limiting, as meeting surge demands requires hospitals to engage in practices tailored to a surge’s unique contingencies. We argue that a dynamic view of surge management should include surge management capability, which refers to how resources are deployed to respond to surge contingencies. To understand this capability, we qualitatively studied five hospital systems experiencing multiple surges due to COVID-19 between April 2020 and March 2022. We develop a framework showing that managing surges involves preserving capacity, expanding capacity, smoothing capacity demand, and enabling surge management. We contribute to surge literature by identifying practices hospitals can adopt to address surges and offering a better understanding of surge conditions (e.g., degree of novelty) that make some surge management practices more appropriate than others.

中文翻译：

---

管理需求激增：激增管理能力的基础概念框架

激增管理对医院运营很重要，但激增文献主要集中在大流行等事件期间增加资源（例如，增加 25% 的床位）。这种观点是有局限性的，因为满足激增的需求需要医院采取针对激增的独特突发事件的做法。我们认为，动态管理应包括激增管理能力，即如何部署资源来应对激增突发事件。为了了解这种能力，我们对 2020 年 4 月至 2022 年 3 月期间因 COVID-19 经历多次激增的五个医院系统进行了定性研究。我们开发了一个框架，表明管理激增涉及保留容量、扩大容量、平滑容量需求和启用激增管理。我们通过确定医院可以采取的应对激增的做法并更好地了解激增情况（例如新颖程度）来为激增文献做出贡献，从而使某些激增管理做法比其他做法更合适。