Resilience of health systems to infectious disease outbreaks and natural hazards
Citation: Nuzzo JB, Meyer D, Snyder M, et al. What makes health systems resilient against infectious disease outbreaks and natural hazards? Results from a scoping review. BMC Public Health. 2019;19:1310.
Language: Abstract and full text available in EN.
Free to view: Yes.
Funding sources: Rockefeller Foundation.
What is this? In this scoping review, the authors searched for articles that identified recurring themes and capacities needed for health system resiliency to infectious disease outbreaks and natural hazards, and for existing frameworks that would highlight these capacities. They restricted their searches to articles published in English between 1990 and February 2018. They identified 77 key documents, which described 16 high-level themes of health system resilience.
What was found: No existing implementation frameworks were found that could be used to improve health systems resilience to infectious disease outbreaks and natural hazards in a variety of settings.
The 16 high-level themes of health system resilience were core health service capabilities; barriers to healthcare access; maintaining critical infrastructure and transportation; timely and flexible access to emergency/crisis financing; leadership and command structure; collaboration, coordination and partnerships; communication; flexible plans and management structures; legal preparations; surge capacity; altered standards of care; health workforce; medical supplies and equipment; infection prevention and control; commitment to quality improvement; and plans for post-event recovery.
Implications: The authors of the review concluded that an implementation-oriented health system resilience framework could help translate the important components that they identified into specific capacities that could be used to improve resilience to infectious disease outbreaks and natural hazards. They also stated that there is a need to further refine the concept of resilience so that health systems can achieve sustainable transformations in practice and delivery and improve their preparedness for emergencies.
Other considerations: The authors of the review discussed their findings in the context of socioeconomic status.
This summary was prepared by Catherine Haynes, checked by Cristián Mansilla and Jawaria Karim, and finalized by Mike Clarke,
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