Overview

Health system resilience is key to coping with catastrophic events, such as the economic crisis and the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, but there is much confusion about what resilience means, how to strengthen it and how to assess it.

This policy brief by the European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies notes that any assessment of health system resilience is crisis- and context-specific. It is important to employ a range of both quantitative and qualitative metrics that allow evaluation of particular aspects of health system resilience in order to provide a meaningful overall assessment.  However, analyzing experiences of other countries provides useful lessons for policy-makers implementing resilience-enhancing strategies. It is particularly important to learn in the aftermath of the shock and make the link between recovering from the shock to preparedness for future shocks, which is an area often neglected once the health system returns to post-shock ‘normality’. This policy brief aims to help policy-makers support resilience-strengthening reforms.