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Resilience for health—an emergent property of the “health systems as a whole”
Author(s) -
Sturmberg Joachim P.
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
journal of evaluation in clinical practice
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.737
H-Index - 73
eISSN - 1365-2753
pISSN - 1356-1294
DOI - 10.1111/jep.13045
Subject(s) - interdependence , resilience (materials science) , property (philosophy) , context (archaeology) , psychological resilience , meaning (existential) , health care , psychology , sociology , environmental ethics , environmental resource management , political science , social psychology , epistemology , geography , social science , economics , philosophy , physics , archaeology , psychotherapist , thermodynamics , law
Resilience has become a popular term, and its meaning varies widely depending on the context of its use. Its Latin origin, resilire , means “bouncing back”—should bouncing back be understood literally or rather metaphorically in the context of health, illness, dis‐ease, and disease? This essay examines ecological, physiological, personal, and health system perspectives inherent in the concept of resilience. It emerges that regardless of the level of aggregation, resilience is a systems property —it is as much a property of each of the subsystems of network physiology , the person , and the health care delivery system as it is a property of the health system as a whole . Given the interdependencies between people, their internal and external environments, and the health service system, strengthening resilience, ie, the ability to positively adapt to challenges and changing circumstances, will require a broad‐based public discourse: “ How can we strengthen resilience and health for the benefit of people and society at large”.