What is a Shock- Responsive Health System? - A Framework to Inform Maintains Research

The framework draws together ideas from the literature on health systems, resilience, health security, and related areas, and identifies the components of a health system and interactions with the wider context that may be affected by shocks and that affect the ability of the health sector to respond. [...] Considerations here include: recognising and supporting household and community roles and activities that promote and protect health routinely or in response to shocks; building community trust in the health system before, during, and beyond the shock; ensuring health service access; and addressing the multi-faceted challenges (economic as well as social) faced by communities during a shock. [...] • Shocks can also strain other social services and related public and private systems that affect the social determinants of health and the functioning of the health system: for example, disruption to social protection and nutrition services can increase food insecurity and exacerbate health needs. [...] Beyond the formal planning and coordination functions, governance can also be understood as involving intangible software – those aspects of the health system that relate to informal institutions and the rules of the game, the implicit and explicit rules and institutions that shape power and the relationships between actors (Topp, 2020). [...] Community health systems Key aspects of the community health system include community-level health workers, household health-seeking behaviour and decisions, access, and demand, inequities in health needs and access, and community engagement.