What makes health systems resilient against infectious disease outbreaks and natural hazards? Results from a scoping review

Nuzzo, Jennifer B.; Meyer, Diane; Snyder, Michael; Ravi, Sanjana J.; Lapascu, Ana; Souleles, Jon; Andrada, Carolina I.; Bishai, David

The themes and capacities identified in our literature review provide an initial step in refining the concept of health system resilience to enable actors across the various sectors of the health system to take action to be able to respond and recover from infectious disease outbreaks and natural hazards. There remains a need to further define the concept of resilience so that health systems can simultaneously achieve sustainable transformations in public health practice and health service delivery as well as improve their preparedness for emergencies. In the same way that the JEE tool has helped motivate countries to assess and improve their core public health capacities, an implementationoriented health system resilience framework could help translate the important components of a health system identified in this review into specific capacities that actors in the health system could work to develop to improve resilience to public health crises. Moreover, such an effort may help to integrate foundational health system capacities into national efforts to improve core public health capacities.