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Patient safety is a major issue and a challenge to be addressed by public policy. New alternative approaches are currently being developed within the international community. In particular, these new approaches include the concept of “resilience”.In this context, this literature review presents this new trend called “resilience engineering”. It is based on scientific articles in French and English identified in two large databases (Cairn and Science Direct). The overall objective was to determine how this concept can help us to understand the functioning of the healthcare system and propose new ways to improve patient safety.Three main characteristics of the resilience approach were identified, supporting the value of resilience engineering in healthcare systems. To illustrate these results, the review presents an illustrative example in the field of anaesthesia.In conclusion, it is now clear that traditional approaches to safety have many limitations for risk prevention in healthcare: work organization must promote adaptive strategies built by healthcare teams. The new concept of “resilience” appears to be a relevant tool to achieve this goal.