Defining Health System Capacity: A Rapid Review

Health systems provide essential resources to optimize, maintain, or restore the health of populations. The extent to which a health system can meet the needs of a local community can be considered the system’s “capacity”; however, it is unclear what this constitutes. We conducted a standardized rapid review to understand how health system capacity has been conceptualized in academic and grey literature. We conducted duplicate screening and data extraction. We summarized document characteristics descriptively and definitions/frameworks narratively. We identified 22 relevant documents; three (14%) provided a definition and 20 (91%) provided a framework. Each definition provided was unique. We synthesized reported frameworks into 11 key elements of health system capacity. We identified an infrequent and inconsistent conceptualization of health system capacity in published literature; however, this review may be used as a starting point for defining and describing key elements of capacity.