By Fineline Cube 
The National Health Commission, National Development and Reform Commission, and State Commission Office of Public Sectors Reform (SCOPSR), along with a total of 13 ministries, jointly released the Guidance on Optimizing the Layout and Development of Primary Healthcare Institutions last week. The document outlines phased targets and key tasks to enhance primary healthcare services across China.
Phased Targets
- By 2027: Achieve full coverage of township- and subdistrict-level primary healthcare institutions, ensure basic healthcare services for all administrative villages and urban communities, and significantly improve infrastructure conditions of primary healthcare institutions.
- By 2030: Establish a more balanced and rational layout for primary healthcare institutions, popularize telemedicine and smart healthcare services, and enhance accessibility to primary healthcare.
- By 2035: Align the layout of primary healthcare institutions and their capacity for disease prevention, treatment, and health services with the demands of people-centered urbanization and rural revitalization, better meeting the high-quality health needs of urban and rural residents.
Key Tasks and Measures
- Strengthen Township Health Centers
- Establish one health center per township.
- Prioritize building 1–2 central township health centers in areas with large populations and remote from county hospitals, aiming to elevate their service capacity to secondary hospital standards.
- Rationalize Village Clinics
- Establish one village clinic per administrative village, with enhanced focus on border regions and ethnic minority areas.
- Enhance Community Health Service Centers
- Ensure one community health service center per subdistrict.
- Expand existing centers in subdistricts with populations exceeding 100,000 based on demand.
- Optimize Community Health Service Stations
- Flexibly establish community health service stations, integrating them with health centers where feasible.
- Leverage private clinics and outpatient facilities to meet personalized and diversified healthcare needs.
- Improve Service Coordination
- Strengthen county-township, rural-urban, and cross-regional collaboration through compact medical consortiums.
- Accelerate county-wide resource-sharing centers (e.g., medical labs, imaging, ECG, pathology, sterilization) to enable “primary-level testing, upper-level diagnosis, and mutual recognition of results.”
- Unify medication lists within county medical alliances to ensure seamless pharmaceutical services.
- Boost Service Capacity
- Implement a healthcare infrastructure enhancement initiative.
- Expand family doctor contract services and integrate telemedicine and AI-assisted diagnostics for comprehensive, lifelong health management.
- Strengthen Workforce Development
- Expand recruitment through programs like the “College Graduate Rural Doctor Initiative” and tuition-free medical student training for rural areas.
- Provide hybrid (online/offline) training to upskill primary healthcare workers.
Supporting Measures
The document emphasizes organizational leadership, strategic planning, policy implementation, and public communication to ensure effective execution of the outlined goals and measures.-Fineline Info & Tech