Best practice reflections on health system responses to COVID-19 in Europe

Healthcare systems frequently find themselves ill-equipped to handle unexpected shocks, underscoring the importance of evaluating and enhancing their resilience. This chapter explores policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, seeking to shed light on practices that enhanced the resilience of the health systems. It acknowledges challenges in defining and measuring resilience, considering various factors beyond the scope and depth of the health system like political leadership and the broader governance factors, the resilience of the health workforce, and the importance of trust. The chapter’s main focus is on the shock management phase and on distilling the key adaptive, absorptive, and transformative strategies that contributed to resilient health system responses. However, it also goes beyond the shock management phase, acknowledging the importance of investing in health system preparedness, particularly in adequate and well-supported health workforce but also in effective governance and generalist state capacity, and in post-shock learning.