OBJECTIVES: The term ‘healthcare system resilience’ becomes topical in strategies and policy planning documents around the world, particularly in the scope of the COVID-19 pandemic. United Nations General Assembly has defined resilience as ‘the ability of a system, community or society exposed to hazards to resist, absorb, accommodate, adapt to, transform and recover from the effects of a hazard in a timely and efficient manner, including through the preservation and restoration of its essential basic structures and functions through risk management.’ The aim of this conceptual paper was to highlight the contextual framework and principal indicators of the healthcare system resistance.

METHODS: The literature review was performed, using PubMed, Web of Science, and Scopus databases.

RESULTS: The results demonstrated that the concept of resilience was introduced to the health systems literature from the ecological sciences through an increased understanding of healthcare systems as complex adaptive systems. In this context, the idea of resilience can act as a useful tool to understand healthcare system dynamics. The ecological idea that strategies to enhance resilience can be based on absorptive, adaptive, or transformative domains depending on the impact and intensity of the crisis has been particularly impactful in the healthcare system resilience discourse. Previous research proposed to define the healthcare system resilience indicators within each of the World Health Organization’s six building blocks of the healthcare system.

CONCLUSIONS: The results of this study identified the research gap between theoretical framework and empirical experience in measuring the healthcare system resilience indicators and therefore provide suggestions for further research. Simultaneously, the question arises about the healthcare ecosystem as an expected future model of healthcare and its comparative level of readiness for resilience, considering issues - to strengthen the resilience of the existing model or transform it into a new, possibly more resilient perspective model.