“It is critical that the Government of China continue with, and accelerate, it’s current health care reforms – to build a health system to address major current and future health challenges,” World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General, Dr Margaret Chan, said at the conclusion of an official visit to China.
“The Government of China has made remarkable progress with health reform in recent years: more than 95 per cent of China’s vast population is now covered by health insurance, and people are using health services more than ever before,” said Dr Chan.
The Government of China’s commitment to health reform has been backed by large-scale, sustained investment: in just one decade from 2001 to 2011, the government share of total health expenditure doubled.
“These are remarkable achievements”, says Dr Chan. “However, further action and investment is critical – in particular, through the expansion of primary and community health care services, and improved linkages between primary health services and hospitals to deliver integrated patient centred care.”
“A strong primary health care system will be critical as China faces challenges such as the ageing of the population and a rapidly escalating burden of non-communicable ‘lifestyle’ diseases such as cancer, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes,” Dr Chan said.
During her visit to China, Dr Chan met with State Leaders, including Premier Li Keqiang, Vice Premier Liu Yandong, Vice-Chairman of the National People’s Congress Standing Committee Professor Chen Zhu, National Health and Family Planning Commission Minister Li Bin, China Food and Drug Administration Minister Yong Zhang, and many other senior government officials and experts.
Other topics on the Director-General’s agenda during her trip to China included tobacco control, non-communicable diseases, and tuberculosis.
“Every year, more than one million people die as a result of tobacco-related illness. This is a terrible statistic. China needs to take urgent action to strengthen its tobacco control policies, to turn these kinds of terrible statistics around,” Dr Chan said.
“The policies contained in the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) are proven to work: smoke-free environments, bans on tobacco advertising, promotion and sponsorship, graphic warnings on tobacco packs, higher taxes. They just need to be implemented,” Dr Chan said.
“Without action and commitment, the burden of non-communicable disease in China will simply be devastating in the future,” Dr Chan said.
However, the Director-General also emphasised the importance of not being complacent about infectious diseases such as tuberculosis.
“As in so many other areas, China has achieved remarkable success in tuberculosis control in the last twenty years: for example, by halving TB prevalence and mortality five years in advance of the global targets for doing so,” Dr Chan said.
“But we must not rest on our laurels: if we want to enter a new phase where TB and multi-drug resistant TB (MDR-TB) are no longer issues of public health concern, we have to ensure that the estimated one million annual new cases of TB, and in particular, the 60,000 new cases of MDR-TB each year, have access to affordable diagnosis and treatment, and patients are not faced with catastrophically high health expenditure,” Dr Chan concluded.
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