Considering Resilience in Health Systems

courtesy of @CameronRaynes

“Resilience” is generally defined as “the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties.” During the 2020-2021 timeframe, Covid-19 has made us realize how important resilience is on an individual and community level. However, resilience can also be incorporated into public health systems at a systemic level, as suggested by HMP Governance Lab collaborator Katarzyna Klasa and her team. After positing that community resilience is “a set of networked adaptive capacities,” they point out that public health resilience should be defined similarly, and be quantifiably measured. Including resilience into health system design sets up communities for success, forcing systems to consider how to recover and adapt after difficulties.

To include resilience in public health systems, Klasa et al. ask the health system planner to consider future devastating events, asking how the system will meet the needs of the people at each stage. This means that communities need to be able to prepare for potential issues and consider how they will absorb, recover and adapt. If a system can meet each stage’s needs, then it can be considered more resilient.

The paper takes the theory to a specific population: aging. The authors argue that previous gerontological literature focuses on minimizing risk but has not focused on recovering from major events. The Covid-19 pandemic provided a perfect opportunity to display the importance of incorporating resilience into systems. Using aging populations, whose ability to bounce back from stressors has been tested through Covid-19, the team models how resilience can be accounted for when considering different metrics like the “Number and relevance of services signed up for” and “Do the resources meet the need over time?” These simple planning questions can have a significant impact in building resilience into a health system.

Ultimately, “System Models” presents a valid argument for early integration of resilience measurements. When planning a public health system, decision makers and policy planners need to consider laying groundwork now for resilience, which can help vulnerable populations like the aging recover long term.  

“System models for resilience in gerontology” provides a general framework of where we can begin to include resilience in system planning.  In the future, I look forward to seeing the team’s recommendations on specific measurements that can be used to integrate resilience into our health systems. 

Link to Article: https://doi.org/10.1186/s12877-020-01965-2