The resilience of health care systems following major disruptive events: Current practice and a path forward

The increasing number of external threats from environmental and human-caused hazards requires that emer-gency health care systems, including healthcare facilities, support services, and other critical infrastructure, seek multi-disciplinary solutions to enhance preparedness and resilience. Before these multi-disciplinary solutions are devised, it is critical to first identify the various elements that are vital for ensuring health care preparedness and resilience and understand how these elements interact. This is important to not only detect knowledge gaps, but also to establish adequate research agendas that can be aligned to address these gaps and allow for proper health care policy reform. In this study, we identify five elements that are essential for health care resilience. We conduct literature review in all these five areas, and we identify the current state-of-the knowledge and existing gaps. We find that substantial research exists in developing empirical surge and patient demand models that limit their use to the data from which they were developed. In addition, we find that very limited studies have been conducted to develop holistic resilience frameworks that can integrate the five elements discussed in the study. These gaps need to be addressed to enable a comprehensive assessment of health care systems under different disruptions.

Automated summary

The increasing number of threats to emergency health care systems necessitates the development of multi-disciplinary solutions to enhance preparedness and resilience. This study identifies five essential elements for health care resilience and highlights existing gaps in knowledge and research. There is a need to address these gaps in order to comprehensively assess health care systems under different disruptions.