START has been engaged by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to produce a baseline landscaping to (1) identify existing health systems-related insights relevant to the COVID-19 outbreak, (2) synthesize what is known about how individuals, communities, and systems react, and (3) identify potential opportunities for how the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation can better prepare health systems to respond.
Health Systems During Epidemics Literature Tool
The START team developed a literature database, which includes qualitative and quantitative literature relevant to understanding health systems during epidemics. The START team collected information on each study including: publication year, authors, title, country/region, setting (LMIC, HIC, both), disease, study type (qualitative, quantitative, mixed-methods), data type (primary, secondary, review, commentary, modelling), themes, link to full text, and abstract. The tool includes 1141 studies across 85 countries/regions. Click here to access the literature tool.
Rapid Landscaping of Literature on Health Systems During Epidemics
The START team summarized the objectives, strategies, and output of the rapid landscape analysis of studies of health systems in the context of epidemics with an emphasis on research that may bear relevance to the global response to COVID-19. Click here to read the entire brief.
Health System Recovery After Epidemics
The START team summarized the recovery of routine health services after the Ebola epidemic in West Africa to identify insights that may be relevant when considering how health systems respond and recover to the COVID-19 pandemic. Click here to read the entire brief.
Resilience of Health Systems During Epidemics
The START team focused on understanding how to build a resilient health system, one that is capable of withstanding health shocks to recover and grow in expected and unexpected conditions. This brief primarily leveraged qualitative findings that explain quantitative trends identified in the Recovery of Health Services brief. Click here to read the entire brief.
Mental Health of Healthcare Workers During Epidemics
Mental health problems are one of the major causes of burden of disease globally, and during epidemics, healthcare workers (HCWs) are at a heightened risk of adverse mental health symptoms. The START team summarized what has been learned in prior epidemics and during the current COVID-19 pandemic to understand the scope of the mental health issues among HCWs and the associated risk and protective factors. Click here to read the entire brief.
Maintaining the Health Workforce
This brief assesses factors which affect the ability of healthcare workers to perform their duties during epidemics and interventions that can address these barriers. Click here to read the entire brief.
Methods Annex
The START team describe the methods for developing the health systems literature tool and the briefs above. Click here to read the entire methods annex.
