Social Sciences in China (Chinese Edition)

No.12, 2019

 

Governance Innovation in Basic Health Care in the “Healthy China” Strategy

(Abstract)

 

Gu Xin

 

Strengthening the service capacity of primary health care institutions is one of the strategic goals of the Healthy China Program. After more than thirty years of hard work, China has established a complete system of basic health care. However, on the highly administrative supply side of health care, basic health care providers (primary health care institutions) serving urban and rural residents are at the bottom of a huge hierarchy, leaving them permanently weakened. As the Healthy China Program enters the “new era,” the governance of basic health care urgently needs renewal. This implies reducing the dominance of administrative mechanisms and adjusting their operating mode while at the same time introducing market and community mechanisms to boost administrative, market and community governance and embed it in a new complementary institutional pattern. The establishment and consolidation of this new pattern will not only coincide with overall trends in the global reform of basic health care, but also offers the possibility of becoming an important expression of the modernization of China’s national governance system in the health care field.