Current Projects

Developing a Health Systems Resilience Checklist and Implementation Guide

The Center is creating a resilience checklist and implementation guide that health systems can use to assess whether they are prepared to maintain essential functions during an emergency.

Faced with a major disaster or infectious disease outbreak, the people and organizations that promote, restore, and maintain a community’s health should be able to successfully treat the sick and protect the well. Doing so requires skilled clinicians, fully staffed and equipped healthcare facilities, public health monitoring and case management, clinical care research and protocols, and numerous other capabilities and capacities assessed in detail by the Center’s checklist. There is currently no overarching international assessment framework that addresses the resources within health systems necessary for treating patients, or that considers the interdependence of health systems with other sectors (eg, critical infrastructure, supply chains, regulations and other legal protections). The Center’s resilience checklist will fill these gaps.

The project team's work will be informed by themes gleaned from a comprehensive review of relevant literature and key takeaways from dozens of interviews with experts in healthcare preparedness, health systems strengthening, global health security, epidemic response and management, and community and health system resilience. The team plans to pilot a draft checklist in partnership with a host country in late 2018 before finalizing the checklist and companion implementation guide for wide distribution in early 2019.

Project team lead: Jennifer Nuzzo, DrPH

Project team: David Bishai, MD, PhD, professor in the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health; Eric Toner, MD; Diane Meyer, RN, MPH; and Michael Snyder, MA.

Project supported by: Rockefeller Foundation

Resources:

• Project announcement