High-performing and resilient health systems are essential to the health and wellbeing of countries in Europe, as well as for health security, as was illustrated so vividly during the COVID-19 pandemic (Rajan et al., 2022). Health system performance aims to achieve optimal health outcomes and relates to how well health systems achieve their goals, including quality, access, equity, efficiency, responsiveness, overall health improvement, people-centredness and financial protection (Papanicolas et al., 2022). Health systems’ resilience is their ability to prepare for, manage and learn from a sudden, unanticipated, and extreme disturbance (Sagan et al., 2021) and the aim to withstand and recover from shocks by maintaining core health system functions.