Health System Resilience: Understanding Complex Adaptive Systems

From a lead researcher in the field, an instructive edited collection on how to mitigate crises and stresses to ensure that the health systems we rely on continue to thrive.

Health systems—which include, but are not limited to, health centers, hospitals, or provincial or national health systems—are adaptive complex systems that are dynamic and organic. They evolve along with their changing environments. In Health System Resilience, Karl Blanchet and other contributors build on system thinking theories and complexity science to reveal the dynamics of health systems.

The book addresses how health systems absorb shocks, adapt to those shocks, and sometimes transform because of them. Since health systems are managed by human beings (patients, clinicians, allied professionals, managers), contributors also discuss how human beings make decisions in situations of change, how they process information, and how they analyze that information to make those decisions—which, in turn, affect the functioning of health systems.

The book also takes a deep dive into the COVID-19 pandemic and how it has transformed health systems as well as how professionals or patients interact with those health systems.

A crucial resource for health service managers, policymakers, researchers, and students alike, Health System Resilience offers knowledgeable expertise as well as the latest methods and tools that can be applied to the management of health systems in times of crisis.

Karl Blanchet is Director of the Geneva Centre of Humanitarian Studies at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Geneva, which specializes in public health and health systems research in humanitarian crisis–affected and fragile states.