Resilience of Health Systems: Understanding Uncertainty Uses, Intersecting Crises and Cross-Level Interactions; Comment on "Government Actions and Their Relation to Resilience in Healthcare During the COVID-19 Pandemic in New South Wales, Australia and Ontario, Canada"

Kayvan Bozorgmehr, Andreas Zick, Tobias Hecker
2022 International Journal of Health Policy and Management  
The COVID-19 pandemic has created opportunities to study resilience in multiple, interrelated societal systems while considering the institutional, community and individual level. We aim to discuss critical, yet underrepresented, issues in resilience discourses which are fundamental to advance theories, concepts and measurement of health system resilience. These relate to a better understanding of i) how government's handle and use uncertainties to facilitate or impede change, including the
more » ... of negotiation and conflicts, ii) the intersections of health with multiple, cooccurring crises (systemic intersections), and iii) cross-level interactions, i.e. the interrelation between individual-level resilience, the collective resilience of groups and communities, and the resilience of a system as a whole (and vice versa). Analyses of these aspects can help to "contextualize" our understanding of resilience in complex adaptive systems. However, conceptual clarity is needed whether resilience is considered an underlying feature, outcome, or intermediate determinant of a (health) system's performance.
doi:10.34172/ijhpm.2022.7279 pmid:35658333 pmcid:PMC9808231 fatcat:chulxvdpnjfidpxpp4pltzhpwy