Ensuring the health system resilience

Abstract

The article examines the concept of "health system resilience" - the ability of the system to resist threats, overcome their destructive impact and adapt to negative consequences by preserving and restoring its basic structures and inherent functions.

The process of forming a health system resilience includes developing its conceptual model, vision, possible scenarios, as well as identifying key variables, assessing stakeholders throughout the process, and its consequences.

The analysis of the health system resilience involves solving a number of tasks: identifying threats to the system stability in modern conditions; defining objects of protection; defining main factors and conditions that ensure the resilience of the health system; determining level of competence and relationships of subjects that carry out related activities; providing counteraction to threats and localization of their consequences.

An important role for ensuring health system resilience lies in mechanisms which are used by health system participants for collection, structuring and interpretation of data during decision making process; in strategies applied by stakeholders to manage unexpected events; in interaction between health and other complex systems; and in principles of its institutional development.

Since there is a certain degree of unpredictability in financial, political and environmental fields, ensuring a resilient health system is an important task for the authorities that enables them to prevent emergencies, provide timely and adequate responses, and reduce their impact. Preparing a system to act in an ever changing environment is an iterative process that, considering the emergence of new challenges, requires continuous updates. Given the current demographic situation, the issue of ensuring the health system resilience becomes of paramount importance in the period of the transformation of Ukrainian health care.