Summary
Proposing and developing a definition and conceptual framework for health care resilience to cope with disasters
Zhong S, Clark M, Hou XY, Zang YL, Fitzgerald G
Affiliation of the authors
School of Public Health and Social Work & Institute of Health and Biomedical Innovation, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia. School of Nursing, Shandong University, Jinan, Shandong Province, China.
DOI
Quote
Zhong S, Clark M, Hou XY, Zang YL, Fitzgerald G. Proposing and developing a definition and conceptual framework for health care resilience to cope with disasters. Emergencias. 2014;26:69-77
Summary
Building health care resilience is an important step towards creating more resilient
communities to better cope with future disasters. To date, however, there appears to be
little literature on how the concept of health care resilience should be defined and
operationalized. This article aims to build a comprehensive health care disaster
management approach guided by the concept of resilience. Health electronic databases
were searched to retrieve critical publications that may have made a contribution to the
research aims and objectives. A total of 61 publications were included in the final
analysis. These papers were those offering a comprehensive description of theories and
definitions of disaster resilience and proposing a definition and conceptual framework for
health care resilience. Resilience is an inherent, adaptive ability to cope with future
uncertainty. It implies the use of multiple strategies and an all-hazards approach. It also
seeks to achieve a positive outcome through linkage and cooperation between various
elements of the community. Health care resilience can be defined as the ability of health
care organizations to resist, absorb, and respond to the shock of disasters while
maintaining essential functions and recovering to their original state or adapting to a
new state. It can be assessed by criteria such as robustness, redundancy, resourcefulness and rapidity and includes the key dimensions of vulnerability and safety, disaster resources and preparedness, continuity of essential health service, recovery, and
adaptation. This new concept places health care organizations disaster capabilities,
management tasks, activities, and disaster outcomes together into a comprehensive
system, using an integrated approach and with an achievable goal. Future investigation
of its measurement is urgently needed.