Abstract
BackgroundResilient and responsive healthcare systems is on the agenda as ever before. COVID-19, specialization of services, resource demands, and technology development are all examples of aspects leading to adaptations among stakeholders at different system levels whilst also attempting to maintain high service quality and safety. This commentary sets the scene for a journal collection on Resilient and responsive health systems in a changing world. The commentary aims to outline main challenges and opportunities in resilient healthcare theory and practice globally, as a backdrop for contributions to the collection.Main textSome of the main challenges in this field relate to a myriad of definitions and approaches to resilience in healthcare, and a lack of studies having multilevel perspectives. Also, the role of patients, families, and the public in resilient and responsive healthcare systems is under researched. By flipping the coin, this illustrates opportunities for research and practice and raise key issues that future resilience research should pay attention to. The potential of combining theoretical lenses from different resilience traditions, involvement of multiple stakeholders in co-creating research and practice improvement, and modelling and visualizing resilient performance are all opportunities to learn more about how healthcare succeeds under stress and normal operations.ConclusionA wide understanding of resilience and responsiveness is needed to support planning and preparation for future disasters and for handling the routine small-scale adaptation. This collection welcomes systematic reviews, quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-methods research on the topic of resilience and responsiveness in all areas of the health system.
Highlights
Some of the main challenges in this field relate to a myriad of definitions and approaches to resilience in healthcare, and a lack of studies having multilevel perspectives
What worked and why? What supported these adaptations to happen quickly and safely? What were barriers or challenges for adaptation? What adaptations have, or should have, been retained? What were the knock on effects of the adaptations for services, patients and staff? How have patients, families and the public contributed to the resilience of healthcare services? What does this mean for resilient healthcare theory?
We argue that a broad perspective on resilience and responsive healthcare systems, facilitates deeper insights into how systems and actors operate and depend on each other to maintain high quality care
Summary
Challenges There is a myriad of definitions of resilience coming from diverse research fields and sectors [2, 4, 5]. There are diverse resilience approaches which stem from different perspectives, disciplines (e.g. psychology, engineering, ecology) and sectors (health, social science, economics), which collectively may provide new insight into the societal challenges we are facing today In this collection we encourage a broad empirical orientation on resilience from the smallest team units in service provision [14] to the health systems and actions taken at policy level and on the international scene [2]. There is a real need for larger and multilevel studies that investigate how actors at the upper levels of healthcare systems contribute to resilience and create environmental and contextual conditions under which service providers work and perform in resilient ways [19–24] This links to the literature on health systems resilience [2]. We hope this special collection will contribute to this knowledge generation
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