A Holistic View of Health Infrastructure Resilience Before and After COVID-19

Large-scale events such as COVID-19 show that there are situations that can lead to huge stress on healthinfrastructure systems (HIS). The pandemic reveals that it is very difficult to protect HIS from all kinds of possible hazards.They can be unpredictable and spread rapidly; hence, it is hard to find an effective mitigation strategy to completely protectsociety and its important HIS.

An often raised central question is what we should do if we cannot protect HIS from these types of hazards. Toanswer this question, the focus should move from HIS protection to HIS resilience. Therefore, in this paper, the CriticalInfrastructure Resilience Index (CIRI) is used to estimate the resilience of health infrastructure systems.

The results of the case study show that HIS resilience was enhanced significantly after the implementation ofmeasures. The results indicate that among the resilience phases the learning phase of resilience is the weakest part.This requires a root cause analysis, which should be prioritized by HIS managers and stakeholders.

This paper discusses how the resilience concept will help decision- and policy-makers to have a clearview of HIS performance before, during, and after the disaster. An easy-to-use and applicable methodology for HISassessment and evaluation was employed. It can be concluded that resilience and its identified phases can help HISmanagers to allocate available resources accordingly in the phases during and post-crisis.Level of evidence: V