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The peer-reviewed journal of the Sax Institute
RESEARCH ARTICLE (Open Access)

The Australian health system response to COVID-19 from a resilient health care perspective: what have we learned?

Robyn Clay-Williams A * , Frances Rapport A and Jeffrey Braithwaite A
+ Author Affiliations
- Author Affiliations

A Australian Institute of Health Innovation, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW

* Correspondence to: robyn.clay-williams@mq.edu.au

Public Health Research and Practice 30, e3042025 https://doi.org/10.17061/phrp3042025
Published: 9 December 2020

Abstract

As of late 2020, Australia’s response to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has been relatively successful in comparison with responses in Northern Europe and the US – but what have we learned? In this perspective, we used a resilient health care approach to frame the health system response in three key Australian states (New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland) with large and diverse population groups. We assessed their response in terms of four resilience capacities: how did Australian health authorities monitor public health to enable anomalies to be detected; how did they anticipate the emerging COVID-19 crisis; how did they respond to the pandemic; and what did they learn from this experience? Increased system agility and new ways of working, including contact tracing, telehealth and resource-sharing, are now available to underpin Australia’s response to future challenges or other unexpected events.

2020 © Clay-Williams et al. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International Licence, which allows others to redistribute, adapt and share this work non-commercially provided they attribute the work and any adapted version of it is distributed under the same Creative Commons licence terms.