A Spoonful of Resilience

A resilient health care system must constantly evolve and self-organize in order to deal with emerging situations that arise from both social and ecological realms. It must identify and react to surprises, as well as evaluate its ongoing response to changes – all while maintaining essential services.

Attaining this degree of resilience depends on continual questioning and learning, and thus, innovation. In the context of health care, it requires that we re-evaluate our tendency to focus only on the existing system. Instead, we need to question whether the system’s current structure is part of the problem, and be willing to engage in transformative change in terms of how we define the health care system and perceive its problems. This approach would help us re-examine the boundaries of traditional health care systems and provide a fresh understanding of what we consider “health” to be.

The SARS epidemic was a wake-up call. It forced us to recognize that public health is a global concern. As a result of that traumatic event, Canadians created the Public Health Agency of Canada to help strengthen the country’s health care capacity, and instituted explicit national and provincial emergency-response guidelines, including communications and media relations. These strategies are now being tested by the H1N1 pandemic, which, although it requires a different set of responses, will surely build on the lessons learned from SARS. …