Abstract

► Disease outbreaks and health emergencies can push health systems to a breaking point, especially fragile systems.

► Building resilient and responsive health systems is an imperative for the global health community and there is an important opportunity to address health systems strengthening activities during outbreak response.

► The resources dedicated to outbreaks create organisational infrastructure, capacity and networks that can be leveraged to simultaneously strengthen health systems.

► It is necessary to shift the current paradigm of managing outbreaks to include health system strengthening as a critical component of the response. We identify 10 activities that could be implemented during health emergencies to achieve this goal.

Link to publisher’s web site