Learning from crisis: Enduring habits as foundations for healthcare resilience after COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic brought about profound disruptions in healthcare organizations worldwide, reshaping management structures, professional practices, and core responsibilities. While much research has examined how healthcare systems adapted during the crisis, less is known about how such disruptions translate into longer-term organizational learning. This paper investigates whether and how the experiences from the pandemic led to enduring forms of learning within healthcare systems. Drawing on a longitudinal interview study with 41 Danish healthcare professionals, conducted first at the onset of the pandemic and again 2.5 years later, the paper explores how professionals make sense of what has changed, and of what has remained the same. The analysis reveals that while few formalized or codified changes have endured in everyday healthcare work, more subtle and embodied forms of learning appear to have taken root. These include the development of new habits, informal routines, and collective action predispositions shaped through crisis experience. To conceptualize these learning processes, the study applies John Dewey's pragmatist theory of learning as intelligent habituation - understood as the experience-based refinement of predispositions to act that are embodied yet socially formed and shared. The paper identifies three types of learning outcomes: crisis proficiency (new routines related to infection control), uncertainty aptitude (enhanced capacity to act under unpredictable conditions), and imaginative foresight (renewed sensitivity to organizational alternatives). The findings highlight the often-overlooked role of tacit, embodied, and habitual forms of learning in healthcare and position these as key components for learning from crises and for establishing healthcare resilience. The study also points to a central challenge: how to stabilize and institutionalize such learning without undermining its flexibility. The paper concludes by calling for greater attention to the interplay between habitual and formalized learning, and how both may be cultivated to support more adaptive yet well-functioning healthcare systems.