Identifying Leading Indicators of System Resilience and the Strategy for Developing Them: A Review of Reviews

Abstract Background: System resilience describes the performance or capacity of a system to absorb and adapt in response to stressors and perturbations. This protocol outlines the search strategy to identify indicators or metrics of system resilience from across diverse fields and examine the methods/processes for developing these indicators or metrics.Methods: This protocol is grounded in the Joanna Briggs Institute (JBI) Scoping Review methodology. We will search Web of Science and Scopus for reviews that report on system resilience assessment and measurement techniques. We will also employ snowball sampling techniques. Due to the breadth of the topic, this search will be limited to systematic reviews, meta-analyses, or literature reviews with a structured, documented search strategy reporting on primary research studies published in the English language. We will not limit the search by date or discipline. Reviews that report on psychological resilience or resilience at the level of an individual will be excluded. Discussion: The ability to assess or measure resilience is important to identify risks, opportunities, and strategies to influence sustained, reliable, and predictable sy­stem operations. We hypothesise that there are commonalities in the types of indicators used and how they are developed. These patterns may have relevance to other fields, like healthcare. The findings from this review may help others develop their own indicators and assessment strategies for understanding resilience within their own systems. Ethics and Dissemination: This study is ethics exempt. We will disseminate the results of this work at national and international quality and safety conferences, and through publication of a manuscript.