Disease outbreaks and health emergencies can push health systems to a breaking point, especially fragile systems. Building resilient and responsive health systems is an imperative for the global health community and there is an important opportunity to address health systems strengthening activities during outbreak response. The resources dedicated to outbreaks create organisational infrastructure, capacity and networks that can be leveraged to simultaneously strengthen health systems. It is necessary to shift the current paradigm of managing outbreaks to include health system strengthening as a critical component of the response. We identify 10 activities that could be implemented during health emergencies to achieve this goal.