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Health systems strengthening in China

Edited by Qingyue Meng and Kara Hanson
International Journal for Equity in Health

Health system strengthening aims to improve health by tackling health system constraints and, over the past six decades, China has made great efforts to strengthen its health system and improve the health of the Chinese people. Today, we try to address the growing interest in China’s experiences and lessons in health systems strengthening in a way that will be useful to other low- and middle-income countries with this collection of papers, which presents research on China’s health systems strengthening experience. This will contribute to the knowledge base in health systems research and global health development.

This collection of articles has not been sponsored and articles have undergone the journal’s standard peer review process. The Guest Editors declare no competing interests.

Read the associated blog: "What lessons can be learned from strengthening China’s health system?"

View all collections published in International Journal for Equity in Health

  1. China uses both social health insurance (SHI) programs and a medical financial assistance (MFA) program to protect the poor from illness-induced financial risks. The MFA provides a dual benefit package targeti...

    Authors: Kai Liu, Jing Yang and Chunling Lu
    Citation: International Journal for Equity in Health 2017 16:138
  2. China has a high burden of diabetes mellitus (DM), and a large proportion of DM patients remain untreated for various reasons, including low availability of primary health care providers. DM patient management...

    Authors: Yinzi Jin, Weiming Zhu, Beibei Yuan and Qingyue Meng
    Citation: International Journal for Equity in Health 2017 16:80
  3. Hypertension is a common and frequently occurring chronic disease of the cardiovascular system. Besides the pathological factors, the occurrence and exacerbation of hypertension are also associated with many f...

    Authors: Chenli Wang, Juntao Lang, Lixia Xuan, Xuemei Li and Liang Zhang
    Citation: International Journal for Equity in Health 2017 16:58
  4. China has been undergoing tremendous demographic and epidemiological transitions during the past three decades and increasing burden from non-communicable diseases and an ageing population have presented great...

    Authors: Yafei Si, Zhongliang Zhou, Min Su, Meng Ma, Yongjian Xu and Jesse Heitner
    Citation: International Journal for Equity in Health 2017 16:27
  5. Immunization is the most cost-effective method to prevent and control vaccine-preventable diseases. Migrant population in China has been rising rapidly, and their immunization status is poor. China has tried v...

    Authors: Hai Fang, Li Yang, Huyang Zhang, Chenyang Li, Liankui Wen, Li Sun, Kara Hanson and Qingyue Meng
    Citation: International Journal for Equity in Health 2017 16:19
  6. Since 1968, China has trained about 1.5 million barefoot doctors in a few years’ time to provide basic health services to 0.8 billion rural population. China’s Ministry of Health stopped using the term of bare...

    Authors: Dan Hu, Weiming Zhu, Yaqun Fu, Minmin Zhang, Yang Zhao, Kara Hanson, Melisa Martinez-Alvarez and Xiaoyun Liu
    Citation: International Journal for Equity in Health 2017 16:9
  7. China has made remarkable progress in scaling up essential services during the last six decades, making health care increasingly available in rural areas. This was partly achieved through the building of a thr...

    Authors: Xing Lin Feng, Melisa Martinez-Alvarez, Jun Zhong, Jin Xu, Beibei Yuan, Qingyue Meng and Dina Balabanova
    Citation: International Journal for Equity in Health 2017 16:49
  8. Systems of governance play a key role in the operation and performance of health systems. In the past six decades, China has made great advances in strengthening its health system, most notably in establishing...

    Authors: Beibei Yuan, Weiyan Jian, Li He, Bingyu Wang and Dina Balabanova
    Citation: International Journal for Equity in Health 2017 16:44