Stress-Tested Health Systems: Project Leadership Lessons from Lebanon’s Compounded Crises

Health systems are often judged by their performance in ordinary times; their true design is revealed in crisis. Drawing on Lebanon’s experience during a decade of compounded shocks, this webinar will examine how project leadership can protect health outcomes when resources, time, trust and institutional capacity are all under pressure.

Dr. Firass Abiad will share lessons from leading Rafik Hariri University Hospital and later Lebanon’s Ministry of Public Health through COVID-19, financial collapse, medicine and supply shortages, mass displacement, cholera risk, the Beirut Port explosion aftermath and war-related emergencies. The session will translate these experiences into a project-management lens: how to define priorities when every need is urgent; how to build governance and coordination mechanisms across hospitals, public agencies, donors and communities; how to use data for operational visibility; how to preserve accountability while accelerating decisions; and how to balance centralized command with local adaptability.

The lecture will argue that structured project management is not a bureaucratic luxury during crisis. It is a discipline for sequencing action, aligning stakeholders, protecting scarce resources and maintaining public trust. At the same time, it will explore the limits of frameworks when financing, politics, workforce morale and supply chains are unstable, and why leadership judgment, communication and ethical clarity remain decisive.

Participants will leave with practical insights on managing complex health projects under extreme constraints, executing strategy during national emergencies, and applying resilience and agility lessons from Lebanon to other healthcare systems facing shocks, fragility or reform pressure. The Q&A will invite discussion on how these lessons can inform project-based approaches in both fragile and high-income health systems.