Crisis Preparedness and Response in the Health System: The Role of Strategic Planning

To meet the health needs of the community, health care systems should involve various crucial resources, including humans, finance, pharmaceuticals, medical equipment, information, and physical space. These resources are needed to balance the healthcare system, providing people with a continuum of services for health promotion, disease prevention, diagnosis and treatment, disease management, rehabilitation, and palliative care services based on people’s living conditions. Also, appropriate management and leadership are other vital resources to provide quality, safe, and equal healthcare services. It is clear that strategic planning is one of the most crucial elements of healthcare management, and the importance of this subject becomes more considerable in crisis conditions, which involve the organization or even the whole society. Therefore, it is better for societies to design scenario-based crisis management programs, which would be extremely beneficial for them to overcome the crisis faster with the lowest losses. This scenario-based planning should be given much more importance in countries where the population density and poverty rate are higher and they may not be sufficient in terms of the provision of quality and timely healthcare services. It seems that designing crisis management programs based on three scenarios, which are explained below, can be highly advantageous in paving the way for handling the crisis situation.