Resilience in Health Systems: Coping with Disasters or Handling Everyday Functioning?

This article delves into the concept of resilience in health systems, emphasizing the need to adapt to both everyday functioning and unexpected disasters. It highlights that traditional management models, focusing on institutional capacity, are insufficient for predicting how services adapt to unexpected events. The World Health Organization's definition of health system resilience is explored, stressing the ability to maintain essential health functions during adversity and reorganize based on lessons learned. The article reviews recent research and frameworks, such as the multidimensional framework by Krug et al., Neill et al.'s examination of everyday capabilities, and Haldane and Morgan's introduction of transilience. It also discusses the impact of political and organizational arrangements on resilience, as seen in the COVID-19 responses of various countries. The article concludes by emphasizing the importance of incorporating resilience as an essential aspect in public health systems, requiring ongoing monitoring and evaluation. It calls for a balanced focus on both routine occurrences and extraordinary events in developing resilient public health systems, highlighting the need for new frameworks, indicators, and methods to describe the preventive, adaptive, and absorptive capacities of health systems.