China plans health care system upgrade with focus on infectious disease

Name: China expands two-child policy to three
Uploaded: 2021-07-02T14:06:27.000Z
Duration: 2 min 4 s
Description: China expands two-child policy to three

Five-year blueprint calls for more resources for CDCs and centres in big cities to treat large numbers of patients during an outbreak

It also includes ‘high-quality’ regional and local hospitals and improved facilities for women, children and the elderly

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Xi Jinping has called for an overhaul of the health care system to strengthen weak links exposed by the pandemic. Photo: Xinhua

Josephine Ma

Published: 10:06pm, 2 Jul 2021Updated: 11:06pm, 2 Jul 2021

China’s state planning agency has unveiled a plan to build a network of new institutions to upgrade the health care sector over the next five years, with a focus on tackling infectious disease outbreaks.

Improving the capacity to identify and stop infectious diseases – especially respiratory illnesses – from spreading is a top priority in the National Development and Reform Commission’s plan for the health sector to 2025, which was released on Thursday.

Since Wuhan emerged from its long lockdown last year after the first cases of Covid-19 were detected there in late 2019, President Xi Jinping has repeatedly said that the health care system would be overhauled to strengthen weak links exposed by the pandemic.

The NDRC plan also includes building “high-quality hospitals” at the regional and local levels to take on some of the burden of the overstretched facilities in China’s big cities – a goal that has been around for the past decade but has not yet been achieved.

There are also new targets, such as improving medical facilities for women and children to encourage more people to start families after a policy shift in May allowing couples to have up to three children. It also calls for facilities to address the needs of the ageing population, as well as for people with mental illness and occupational diseases.

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China expands two-child policy to three

To tackle infectious diseases, the government will fund upgrades of the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention at the national and provincial levels. Those aims include improving the ability of the national CDC to identify new pathogens quickly and handle outbreaks; provincial CDCs are to be provided with laboratories carrying a biosafety level of at least P3, so that coronaviruses can be handled.

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