Postdoc HEALTH-RES: Ensuring Critical Resources for Health System Resilience

Help make health systems resilient in times of crisis. As a Postdoctoral Researcher, you will study how essential health resources and infrastructures can be organized to ensure equitable care access.

Healthcare is more than hospitals and its workforce - it depends on a web of critical support systems such as supply chains, transport, energy grids, and water networks. When floods, pandemics, or other disruptions hit, these support systems can fail, creating cascading risks: ambulances can't reach hospitals, medicines run out, power cuts disable equipment, and vulnerable groups lose access to care. The HEALTH RES project (Ensuring critical resources for health system resilience) asks: How can healthcare resilience be strengthened by integrating these critical infrastructures to ensure quality and equitable access to care amid compounded risks?

We will work closely with hospitals, primary care providers, and public health authorities within the Netherlands to understand current practices for sourcing critical supplies, identify vulnerabilities, and co develop a set of indicators that measure how disruptions in support systems affect access to and quality of care. The findings will inform new data, models, and policy recommendations, contributing to both Dutch and international debates on health system resilience, climate adaptation, and health equity.

Your role will be to:

• Map current practices for sourcing and securing critical supplies and materials across partner organisations (e.g. Two hospitals, primary care providers, public health authorities). Methods: semi structured interviews and document analysis.
• Explore what data are available on essential health resources and supporting systems, and assess their usefulness.
• Co-create a regional risk picture by facilitating workshops to prioritise event-disruption-risk combinations with compounding impacts on care (e.g., precipitation extremes, flooding, supply shocks, workforce shortages) using problem structuring methods.
• Develop, together with our expert panel, clear indicators to measure how compound risks affect healthcare quality. This will be done through literature review, stakeholder input, and an iterative Delphi process (a consensus-building method among experts).

You will be part of the Policy Analysis Section within the Multi-Actor Systems (MAS) Department of the Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management. Our team includes around 70 researchers, from PhD candidates to postdocs and senior staff, with backgrounds spanning the social and technical sciences. This interdisciplinary approach makes us unique: we combine different perspectives to address complex societal and technological challenges such as climate change, cybersecurity, and the energy transition.

You will have access to modern research facilities that support your work. The working atmosphere is open and collaborative, with ample opportunity for daily interaction and knowledge sharing. With minimal hierarchical barriers, you will benefit from strong supervision and tailored training. Professional and personal development are central, enabling you to grow and succeed in academia.

Essential

• PhD in a relevant field (e.g., Health Systems/Services Research, Health Policy, Operations/Management Sciences, especially soft systems methodologies, Implementation Science, Disaster/Risk Management, or related).
• Strong qualitative methods (e.g., semi structured interviewing, conceptual frameworks) in problem structuring approaches, and experience conducting research with healthcare organisations.
• Familiarity with healthcare quality and safety concepts and metrics.
• Excellent communication and facilitation skills for co creation workshops with diverse stakeholders (clinicians, procurement, continuity managers, public health, patients/community).
• Commitment to Open Science and research integrity; strong writing skills with a publication track record.
• Due to interactions with healthcare organisations in The Netherlands, Dutch fluency required (especially spoken) and high profiency in English required (written and spoken).

Desirable

• Expertise with consensus methods development (e.g., Delphi or nominal group technique).
• Knowledge of the WHO Health System Performance Assessment (HSPA) framework and quality of care dimensions.
• Experience with healthcare supply chains/materials management and/or critical infrastructure interdependencies (energy, water, transport).
• Exposure to spatial thinking or collaboration with geospatial teams; comfort working across qualitative-quantitative boundaries.

Delft University of Technology is built on strong foundations. As creators of the world-famous Dutch waterworks and pioneers in biotech, TU Delft is a top international university combining science, engineering and design. It delivers world class results in education, research and innovation to address challenges in the areas of energy, climate, mobility, health and digital society. For generations, our engineers have proven to be entrepreneurial problem?'solvers, both in business and in a social context.

At TU Delft we embrace diversity as one of our core values and we actively engage to be a university where you feel at home and can flourish. We value different perspectives and qualities. We believe this makes our work more innovative, the TU Delft community more vibrant and the world more just. Together, we imagine, invent and create solutions using technology to have a positive impact on a global scale. That is why we invite you to apply. Your application will receive fair consideration.

Challenge. Change. Impact

The Faculty of TPM provides an important contribution to solving complex technical?'social issues, such as energy transition, mobility, digitalisation, water management and (cyber) security. TPM does this with its excellent education and research at the intersection of technology, society and policy. We combine insights from both engineering and social sciences as well as the humanities. TPM develops robust models and designs, is internationally oriented and has an extensive network of knowledge institutions, companies, social organisations and governments.

to go to the website of the Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management.

Are you interested in this vacancy? Please apply no later than 23 November 2025 via the application button and upload the following documents:

• CV (in English)
• Cover letter (in English) to highlight how your skills match the profile
• A video pitch (in Dutch, max 2 min). Please upload your video (privately) to Youtube and share the link in your application in a PDF-file

Please note:

• You can apply online. We will not process applications sent by email and/or post.
• knowledge security.
• Please do not contact us for unsolicited services.