Everyday health system resilience: the theory

Lucy Gilson and Edwine Barasa

Chapter 4 in Handbook of Health System Resilience, 2024, pp 44-60 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: The everyday health systems resilience framework was initially derived from empirical research undertaken in Kenya and South Africa examining the nature of chronic stress experienced within district health systems, and the locally led responses to such stress. This chapter presents the framework and discusses its core elements by reference to organisational and socio-ecological resilience theory, as well as wider empirical research. Resilience is understood as an emergent process within a complex, adaptive system generated by responding to stress, rather than as an outcome or system goal. Stress responses represent collective actions, developed and implemented by people and teams, and comprise combinations of absorptive, adaptive and/or transformative strategies. Generating, selecting and implementing such collective actions are, moreover, underpinned, or constrained, by the individual-, team- and system-level resources and practices which embody the system’s cognitive, behavioural and contextual capacities. These capacities include resources and practices that might support the inclusion of previously excluded groups, and their experiences, in decision-making, or deepen their exclusion. The capacities may also be transformed through responding to stress in ways that support the system’s responses to future challenges. Applying the framework in analysing empirical experience involves teasing out the strategies and capacities entailed in resilience processes, as well as the resources and practices in which the capacities are embodied. Such analysis offers insights of relevance to: health system strengthening in the face of chronic stress; deepening health system preparedness to respond to acute shocks; and developing systemic approaches to redress power imbalances and promote health system equity.

Keywords: Economics and Finance; Politics and Public Policy Sociology and Social Policy; Sustainable Development Goals (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.elgaronline.com/doi/10.4337/9781803925936.00010 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:elg:eechap:21698_4

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.e-elgar.com

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Darrel McCalla ().