Birth of an International Journal Dedicated to Health Systems Resilience

Abstract

Health systems, small or large, are essential to ensure the well-being of communities. However, health systems worldwide are struggling with their challenges in delivering services to communities. On top of that, when disasters, conflicts, crises, and pandemics occur, the communities will depend more on the health systems. If the health systems are functional despite the adversities, they can reduce deaths, injuries, diseases, and human suffering in the aftermath of such events. However, such adversities do not spare health systems. On the contrary, they will pose an additional burden for emergency health systems, calling for augmentation of surge capacity. All building blocks of health systems could be affected by shocks and stressors; the COVID-19 pandemic has been the perfect and the most recent example. The lessons learned by health systems, irrespective of their size, complexity, and geographic distribution during the pandemic, call for better understanding and operationalizing of health systems resilience, at all levels, from the global, national, sub-national, and institutional levels. Resilient health systems have some common positive characteristics: they can prepare, respond and recover from shocks and stressors, capitalizing on resources within; they can cope; they can bounce back. However, more academic and practice-based research is needed to expand our understanding of health systems resilience and ways and means of enhancing it. We must learn to look at health systems through a lens of resilience, going beyond the traditional health emergency preparedness and response activities, which are often fragmented and compartmentalized. Each disaster, conflict, crisis, and pandemic can teach us many great lessons on making our health systems more resilient. However, organizational learning will happen only if the health systems are humble, open, and ready to learn, not only from successes but also from failures. The International Journal of Health Systems Resilience (INJHSR) creates a platform for our resilience practitioners to learn from each other. INJHSR promotes sharing of experiences, lessons learned, and best practices on health systems resilience. In addition, INJHSR fosters innovation in the field of health systems resilience. At INJHSR, we celebrate innovations that were successful and scaled up and those that did not do so well because such honest learnings are critical in addressing future challenges. Further, INJHSR will provide opportunities for resilience practitioners to collaborate on promoting health systems resilience. International Journal of Health Systems Resilience is our journal. It is our platform to make our health systems resilient.