The Sustainable Health Systems Design Framework handout helps designers, engineers, and health-system stakeholders address challenges that affect the long-term sustainability of health systems. It translates the paper’s literature review into a practical framework that connects 16 common environmental, economic, and social challenges to 11 actionable design principles. Using the framework helps teams consider stakeholder needs, system context, equity, resource use, and potential unintended consequences when developing and evaluating interventions.

The framework guides teams through three phases: defining a health-system challenge, designing an intervention, and analyzing its broader system impacts. The challenge-to-principle matrix helps teams identify which principles may be relevant to a specific challenge, while the principle descriptions provide additional guidance for making assumptions, tradeoffs, and evaluation metrics explicit. The framework should be revisited as teams learn more about the system. It is intended as a starting point for judgment and context-specific analysis, helping teams revise proposed interventions when primary outcomes or secondary system effects are unacceptable.

To access the handout, click here. To read more about the framework and its supporting research, click here.