Systemic describes a problem, a change, or an effect that reaches the *whole* of something, not one small part of it. If a hospital has a systemic problem, the trouble is not one bad nurse — it is in how the whole hospital is built and run, so changing one person fixes nothing. The word is common in two places. In medicine, a systemic drug or infection travels through the whole body by way of the blood, unlike one that stays in a single spot: a cream on your skin is local, a pill that works everywhere is systemic. In talk about society, money, and organizations, 'systemic racism', 'systemic risk', 'systemic failure' all mean the trouble is built into the system itself. That second use has grown very common in the news since about 2008. This is a formal word and, in the social sense, often a serious accusation — you are saying the fault is not personal but structural, which is a much bigger claim. Note that it is almost always used about problems and about medicine; you rarely hear 'systemic kindness'.