Managing the Russian health resort industry: Key challenges and development trends

Abstract

. Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the need for effective government decisions in the field of public health is becoming increasingly urgent. The article discusses the issues of the Russian health resort industry management as a complex system that plays a key role in the preservation and qualitative improvement of the country’s human potential. The concepts of sustainable development, human potential development, rehabilitation medicine and the system-based approach in management constitute the methodological basis of the research. The methods of analysis, synthesis, systematization and statistical observation are applied. We juxtapose the official statistical data that reflect the state and trends in the health resort industry’s development during the pre-pandemic period. The study identifies the challenges in the health resort industry management and develops the ways to create conditions for qualitative shifts in the field of public well-being and health, and human potential development. The authors substantiate the need to create a modern health resort industry in Russia with a new rest / treatment infrastructure, a regulatory and legislative framework, and information systems for data exchange. Solving this problem requires fundamental changes in the fields of finance and taxation, as well as the training of management staff. We conclude that amid the pandemic, along with serious negative effects, there also emerge incentives to reconstruct the health resort system, which should be founded on long-term government policy measures and system-based management decisions.