BEIJING: The National Health Commission, together with 12 central and State departments, has issued a guideline for optimizing the allocation of primary healthcare resources to adapt to urbanization and demographic changes.
Aiming to provide better access to safe and effective primary healthcare closer to home, the guideline sets a three-phased goal for developing healthcare providers in the next decade, requiring higher accessibility and significantly improved conditions of the infrastructure by 2027.
By 2030, healthcare providers should be situated in a more balanced and reasonable way, and be able to provide telemedicine and smart health services.
By 2035, the distribution and quality of primary healthcare services should be further improved to support the country’s urbanization and rural vitalization efforts, the guideline said.
In China, primary healthcare services are mainly provided by community medical centers based in townships, subdistricts, villages and residential communities.
The layout of services, however, has moved toward taking a new shape in recent years, the National Health Commission said.
“As the (country’s) urbanization drive and the readjustment of administrative divisions continue, the number of primary healthcare institutions has been decreasing in rural areas and increasing in urban areas,” the commission said in a statement.
As the rural population continues to shrink and get older, and the urban population keeps growing, the layout of medical resources in the country needs to adapt, it said.
The guideline requires every township, a grassroots administrative division often located in rural areas, to operate a health center.
Every village should have a medical clinic, and any excess can be repurposed into medical outlets or other kinds of health institutions, the guideline said, adding that villages with small populations or covering a small area can set up a joint clinic with neighboring villages.
A subdistrict, a grassroots division of a city, should operate one community health service center, the guideline said. Also, if a township changes its administrative status and becomes a subdistrict, its health center should be turned into a community health service center.
Zeng Gang, director of the Institute of Urban Development of East China Normal University, said China’s process of urbanization has entailed the readjustment of grassroots administrative divisions, such as merging townships and turning townships into subdistricts.
In this process, the need has emerged to redistribute industries and services, including primary healthcare, Zeng said. –The Daily Mail-China Daily news exchange item
