China’s National Health Commission (NHC), National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), and National Healthcare Security Administration (NHSA) jointly released the “Guiding Opinions on Further Promoting the Development of the Combination of Medical and Elderly Care.” The initiative aims to enhance elderly care services by integrating medical resources with elderly care systems.
Key Policies
- Digital Health Services: Promote “Internet + medical health” and “Internet + nursing services” to provide home-based medical care, including home beds and door-to-door visits. Fees for door-to-door services will be charged through “medical service prices + door-to-door service fees.”
- Community Integration: Strengthen community medical-elderly care capabilities by rebuilding and expanding integrated service facilities. Focus on geriatric disease prevention, early intervention, and family doctor contracting for the elderly, with no repeated charges for services like family doctors and long-term care insurance.
- Elderly Care Institutions: Encourage medical institutions to establish service sites in elderly care facilities, develop rehabilitation hospitals, nursing homes, and palliative care centers. Support geriatric medicine and palliative care departments, and include income from household medical services in unified management.
Support Measures
- Information Systems: Establish a national health information management system for the elderly and a national elderly care service information system.
- Insurance and Land Use: Increase insurance support, designate qualified elderly care medical institutions under medical insurance management, and use medical and social welfare land for integrated projects.
- Investment Funds: Utilize relevant industrial funds to support the development of integrated medical-elderly care facilities.
Talent Development
The document emphasizes multi-channel training for senior care service and management talent, guides medical staff to engage in medical-elderly care services, and expands the disabled care service team. Internal medical institutions in elderly care facilities will be subject to “double random, one public” supervision and random inspections to strengthen industry oversight and implement responsibilities for infectious disease prevention and safety production.-Fineline Info & Tech
