Background: The healthcare resilience is defined as the capacity to adapt to challenges to maintain high quality care despite the change. Health system response to COVID-19 pandemic serves as a tracer of its resilience.

Aim: This comparative study aimed to explore the healthcare resilience in response to COVID-19 in Finland (FIN), and South Africa (SA), during the first wave of the pandemic.

Methodology: The presenters had conducted distinct studies on their country’s response to COVID-19. FIN study focused on the whole country, it is compared to the response of a province of Gouteng in SA. The secondary analysis entailed re-examining data using a READ (Ready materials, Extract data, Analyse data, Distil). World Health Organization's (WHO) health system six building blocks framework (Leadership & governance, information, health workforce, financing, medical products, and service delivery) was applied to the analysis.

Results: The response to COVID-19 included policy development. Challenges of continuously on updated information was experienced. In FIN the adequacy of workforce was secured reorganizing work and recruiting backup employees. In SA there was poor consideration of health workers mental health. Countries struggled to balance economic demands and faced challenges and ambiguities with medical products. All urgent services were not interrupted in FIN, meanwhile SA, there was a neglect of the routine chronic illness services, in favor of COVID-19 patients.

Conclusion: COVID-19 caused a major health system stress test in both countries. However, the comparative experiences drawn on the pandemic provide important lessons of resilience of healthcare to the future challenges.

Key words: COVID-19, health system, resilience, Finland, South Africa