Resilience is the capacity of a system to deal with change (resisting, adapting, or restructuring) or disturbances and continue to function in its present state. However, the level, type and timeframe of change or disturbances may vary from micro incidents up to major disasters, remaining vague in most healthcare systems approach for resilience. Aside from that, most healthcare resilience evaluating models still deal with components and structure, instead of actual system functioning. COVID-19 indicated the need to deeper understanding of the operating conditions of health systems under unpredictable and variable circumstances. This was, to a certain extent, due to the lack of effectiveness of some structure-based evaluation models in predicting the capacity of health systems to deal with the pandemic. In this paper we use recent literature coming from academia and health organizations to reflect upon the need for more research on the functioning of healthcare systems if we really want to deal, improve, and manage their resilience.