Resource centre

What is a Shock-Responsive Health System?

This working paper sets out a conceptual framework for a shock-responsive health system for the Maintains programme. The framework is designed to support the approach to country and cross-country research under Maintains, and to facilitate comparative cross-country learning and synthesis. The primary audience is the Maintains research teams, but hopefully the paper could have value for the wider community working on shock-responsive health systems, and we are actively seeking input on the framework from others working in this space.

The framework draws together ideas from literature on health systems, resilience, health security and related areas, and identifies components of a health system and the wider context that may be affected by shocks, and that affect the ability of the health sector to respond. Maintains will examine the areas laid out in this framework to understand the types of strategies that countries can adopt based on their underlying health system conditions, and the different health system components and wider structures that seem particularly important in enabling shock responsiveness.