The aim of this review is to provide an overview of the literature in the field of safety-regulation in healthcare, combined with principles and methods of resilience. The review question was: How can regulatory activities facilitate or hamper resilient potentials. The relevance of the paper is founded in the need for more knowledge about the relationship between regulation on safety at the macro-level and elements in the concept of resilience. A literature review was conducted for the period 2008-2018, in the databases: Scopus, Science Direct, Cinahl and SAGE. The review revealed that there is a lack of research exploring regulation as a possible flexibility-facilitator in healthcare. Future research can benefit from elaborating the role of resilience in regulatory activities including self- and hybrid regulation.