Health System Resilience-enhancing Strategies for Managing Public Health Emergencies of International Concerns (PHEIC): Success and Challenges A Systematic Review Protocol

Introduction Health system resilience is the ability to prepare, manage, and learn from a sudden and unpredictable extreme change which impacts health systems. Health systems globally have recently been affected by a number of catastrophic events, including natural disasters, and infectious disease epidemics. Understanding health system resilience has never been more essential until emerging global pandemics. Therefore, the application of resilience-enhancing strategies with existing frameworks needs to be assessed to identify the management gaps and give valuable recommendations from the lessons learnt from the global pandemic. Methods The systematic review will be reported using the Preferred reporting items for systematic review and meta-analysis protocols guideline (PRISMA-P). Reporting data on health system building blocks and systematic searches on resilience enhancing strategies for the management of Public Health Emergencies of International Concerns (PHEIC) after the establishment of International Health Regulations (IHR) since managing PHEIC after the establishment of IHR in 2007 will be included. The search will be conducted in PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar. Discussion Health system resilience is key to coping with catastrophic events, such as the economic crisis and COVID-19 pandemic. The mapping of available literature towards the application of resilience-enhancing strategies with existing frameworks needs to be assessed to identify the management gaps and give valuable recommendations from the lessons learnt from the global pandemic to improve the level of preparedness and response to similar public health emergencies in the future. Conclusion A protocol for a global review of health system resilience for pandemic management is described. This review will add to the body of knowledge about health systems enhancing research and policy formulation. Strengths and limitations of this study Strengths Assessing success and challenges of resilience-enhancing strategies to identify the management gaps and give valuable recommendations from the lessons learnt from the global pandemic in future disasters The systematic review will be reported using the Preferred reporting items for systematic review and meta-analysis protocols guideline (PRISMA-P). Collaboration between Asia-Pacific researchers with different background Limitation Unable to do meta-analysis due to nature of the selected scope of the research