India’s COVID-19 battle will be told and retold in the coming years, inspiring both praise for what the country has achieved, and critique for its shortfalls. As India’s story continues to unfold, two strands will mould the various assessments. First is India’s aggregate performance as a developing economy: It marshalled its meagre resources to respond to the exponential threat of the virus, and was determined, too, to be part of global solutions to this scourge, such as the manufacture and supply of life-saving vaccines. The second, and perhaps even more important story is on ground-zero: In its cities and villages, India’s success or failure would be a factor of the leadership and stewardship of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his team in responding to the crisis, and the commitment of the chief ministers and state functionaries to beef up their health systems and save lives. Whichever way the India story is told, there are certain truths that cannot be hidden: We need to invest more in our health systems, and acknowledge the stellar role of our frontline workers and formal and informal health sector personnel, as well as India’s prowess in certain segments of the medical and health industry. In this context, it becomes interesting to see how in the country’s federal structure (where health is a State subject), the sub-national units—i.e., states and union territories (UTs)—have performed. The present work, Health Systems Resilience Index: A Sub-National Analysis of India’s COVID-19 Response, provides answers to that question. It builds on an earlier report published by the Observer Research Foundation in May 2020. That report, State of the States: Two Months of the Pandemic, evaluated India’s initial response to the pandemic shortly after the crisis was officially named by the World Health Organization (WHO). Two years since then, this report attempts a more ambitious goal: to devise a unique Resilience Index for the health systems of India’s states and UTs.

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought to light the importance of not only improving the resilience of health systems to crises but also of ensuring their long-term sustainability. The Partnership for Health System Sustainability and Resilience (PHSSR) was established in 2020 with the goal of building more sustainable and resilient health systems around the world. One of the key objectives of PHSSR is to build knowledge, understanding, and consensus on the dimensions of health system sustainability and resilience, and how they can be improved. To achieve this goal, PHSSR focuses on seven key domains: Governance: the wide range of steering and rule-making related functions carried out by governments and decision-makers as they seek to achieve national health policy objectives. Financing: how health systems generate, pool, and allocate financial resources and pay for health services. Workforce: how health systems plan for, train, recruit, reward, and deploy their workforce, and shape the conditions in which health professionals work. Medicines and Technology: how health systems make use of medicines and (information) technologies in the delivery of health services. Service Delivery: how health services are organised and delivered, including ambulatory and hospital care, and public health. Population Health: how health systems address the social determinants of health and meet the needs and demands of the population. Environmental Sustainability: how health systems prevent and minimise their carbon footprint and the impacts of pollution on the population’s health. By examining each of these domains, PHSSR seeks to identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats to health systems and to generate evidence-informed solutions and policy recommendations to improve sustainability and resilience.

The COVID-19 pandemic presented unique global health, economic, and social challenges that required urgent and coordinated action by countries and international organisations worldwide. The G20 countries, for instance, supported initiatives for equitable vaccine access, strengthened their respective healthcare systems, and promoted pandemic preparedness on a global scale. Not all the G20 economies are equal, however, and there were disparities in their COVID-19 responses and the outcomes. Indeed, the challenges they faced during the pandemic were unique, to begin with, given the differences in the structures and workings of their healthcare systems. In this post-COVID-19 era characterised by greater awareness that health security is of paramount importance to the overall security of nations, it is imperative to evaluate, through a comprehensive lens, the efficiency and effectiveness of healthcare systems.

As innovations are constantly being developed within health care, it can be difficult both to select appropriate new practices and technologies and to successfully adopt them within complex organizations. It is necessary to understand the consequences of introducing change, how to best implement new procedures and techniques, how to evaluate success and to improve the quality of patient care. This comprehensive guide allows you to do just that. Improving Patient Care, 2nd edition provides a structure for professionals and change agents to implement better practices in health care. It helps health professionals, managers, policy makers and researchers to assess new techniques and select and implement change in their organizations. This new edition includes recent evidence and further coverage on patient safety and patient centred strategies for change. Written by an international expert author team, Improving Patient Care is an established standard text for postgraduate students of health policy, health services and health management. The strong author team are global professors involved in managing research and development in the field of quality improvement, evidence-based practice and guidelines, quality assessment and indicators to improve patient outcomes through receiving appropriate healthcare.

The COVID-19 pandemic bared the inadequacies in existing structures of public health and governance in most countries. This book provides a comparative analysis of policy approaches and planning adopted by federal governments across the globe to battle and adequately respond to the health emergency as well as the socio-economic fallouts of the pandemic. With twenty-four case studies from across the globe, the book critically analyzes responses to the public health crisis, its fiscal impact and management, as well as decision-making and collaboration between different levels of government of countries worldwide. It explores measures taken to contain the pandemic and to responsibly regulate and manage the health, socio-economic welfare, employment, and education of its people. The authors highlight the deficiencies in planning, tensions between state and local governments, politicization of the crisis, and the challenges of generating political consensus. They also examine effective approaches used to foster greater cooperation and learning for multi-level, polycentric innovation in pandemic governance. One of the first books on federalism and approaches to the COVID-19 pandemic, this volume is an indispensable reference for scholars and researchers of comparative federalism, comparative politics, development studies, political science, public policy and governance, health and wellbeing, and political sociology.

Urban slum dwellers—especially in emerging-economy countries—are often poor, live in squalor, and suffer unnecessarily from disease, disability, premature death, and reduced life expectancy. Yet living in a city can and should be healthy. Slum Health exposes how and why slums can be unhealthy; reveals that not all slums are equal in terms of the hazards and health issues faced by residents; and suggests how slum dwellers, scientists, and social movements can come together to make slum life safer, more just, and healthier. Editors Jason Corburn and Lee Riley argue that valuing both new biologic and “street” science—professional and lay knowledge—is crucial for improving the well-being of the millions of urban poor living in slums.

COVID-19 is the most significant global crisis of any of our lifetimes. The numbers have been stupefying, whether of infection and mortality, the scale of public health measures, or the economic consequences of shutdown. Coronavirus Politics identifies key threads in the global comparative discussion that continue to shed light on COVID-19 and shape debates about what it means for scholarship in health and comparative politics. Editors Scott L. Greer, Elizabeth J. King, Elize Massard da Fonseca, and André Peralta-Santos bring together over 30 authors versed in politics and the health issues in order to understand the health policy decisions, the public health interventions, the social policy decisions, their interactions, and the reasons. The book’s coverage is global, with a wide range of key and exemplary countries, and contains a mixture of comparative, thematic, and templated country studies. All go beyond reporting and monitoring to develop explanations that draw on the authors' expertise while engaging in structured conversations across the book.