Organizational change and everyday health system resilience: Lessons from Cape Town, South Africa

This paper reports a study from Cape Town, South Africa, that tested an existing framework of everyday health system resilience (EHSR) in examining how a local health system responded to the chronic stress of large-scale organizational change. Over two years (2017–18), through cycles of action-learning involving local managers and researchers, the authorial team tracked the stress experienced, the response strategies implemented and their consequences. The paper considers how a set of micro-governance interventions and mid-level leadership practices supported responses to stress whilst nurturing organizational resilience capacities. Data collection involved observation, in-depth interviews and analysis of meeting minutes and secondary data. Data analysis included iterative synthesis and validation processes. The paper offers five sets of insights that add to the limited empirical health system resilience literature: 1) resilience is a process not an end-state; 2) resilience strategies are deployed in combination rather than linearly, after each other; 3) three sets of organizational resilience capacities work together to support collective problem-solving and action entailed in EHSR; 4) these capacities can be nurtured by mid-level managers’ leadership practices and simple adaptations of routine organizational processes, such as meetings; 5) central level actions must nurture EHSR by enabling the leadership practices and micro-governance processes entailed in everyday decision-making.