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Health is the foundation of the all-round development of human beings and of the great significance to safeguarding national security, social stability and unity, and the economic development. Human resources are the first resource of China’s economic and social development. Health human resource is the health guardian of the people and an important support for building a moderately prosperous society in all respects, a healthy China and realizing the basic medical and health services for all. Health human resource status determines the level, ability and effectiveness of health service, and is the first resource for the undertaking of hygiene and health. Building a health human resource team of sufficient number, high quality, structure of optimization, and reasonable distribution is the foundation of our country’s continuous development of hygiene and health undertaking, and an important task to protect the health of the people. Strengthening the construction of health human resources is the overall requirement to implement the strategy of reinvigorating China through human resource development. In particular, with the deepening of the reform of medical and health system, the decisive position and role of the health talents are fully recognized, and the need to strengthen the construction of the health personnel team is becoming more and more urgent. The first is that with the development of economy and the changes of residents’ lifestyle, as well as the development of aging and urbanization, the demand for health services such as chronic diseases, public health, rehabilitation, elderly care and maternal and child health care is increasing. The second is that with the establishment of the hierarchical system of medical diagnosis and treatment, and the rapid development of information technology, the medical and health service mode and service level are deeply affected. The third is that with the globalization of health and the implementation of “One Belt and One Road” development strategy, higher requirements are put forward for international cooperation in the field of hygiene and health. All these changes have put forward the new requirements for health human resources. The talent problem is inevitable in further development of hygiene and health industry, for health talent is the health service provider and the powerful promoter of healthy China strategy. Therefore, it is necessary to further improve policies, strengthen human resources construction, arouse enthusiasm, and continuously meet the growing needs for health services of the people.

Deepening the reform of medical and health system, greatly focused on by the Party Central Committee and the State Council, is an important part of comprehensively deepening reform and a major livelihood project of hearts and minds to safeguard the health and well-being of the people. After launching a new round of medical and health reform in 2009, and especially since the 18th national congress of the communist Party of China, deepening the medical reform has been put to a more important position in the overall cause of the Party and the state by means of the overall planning, comprehensive promotion, continuous improvement of the top-level design. A relatively perfect institutional framework has been established and the significant progress and mark results in deepening reform made.

During the 12th 5-Year Plan Period, the State Council issued National Fitness Program (2011–2015) and the local governments above county level also issued Implementation Program for National Fitness. With the implementation of these programs, the national fitness campaign was widely carried out and people’s physical fitness and health kept on improving, which were mainly revealed in the following aspects

With rapidly increased number of medical institutions and ward beds as well as expanded scale of medical institutions, great achievements have been made in the medical and health service systems during the 12th 5-Year Plan period. While strengthening the construction of the medical insurance system, government has also continuously enhanced the construction of the public medical care delivery systems by various means, both providing support to medical care delivery systems and satisfying people’s needs, which created a favorable funding environment for the development of the health system. The increased medical professionals were 960,000 during the period between 2007 and 2010, with an average annual growth of 240,000, and 1673,600 during the period between 2010 and 2015, with an average annual growth of 334,700. Public funding also soared to a greater height during the same period. Government payment as a share of total health increased by 129 billion yuan from 2004 to 2007, 315 billion yuan from 2007 to 2010 and 674.28 billion yuan from 2010 to 2015. The increased percentage was from 22.3% in 2007, to 28.7% in 2010 and 30.4% in 2015.

As China’s economy goes into the new normal, hard constraints such as resources, environment and climate variation will slow it down. However, the great potential for economic development and the inertia for economic growth will still keep China’s economy growing at a medium-to-high speed. It is predicted that China’s GDP will maintain a growth rate of 6.5–7% in 2016–2020 and a medium-high rate of growth in 2020–2030 (see Fig. 2.1).

Healthy living refers to the habitual behaviors beneficial to one’s health, which should include the following aspects: well-balanced diets, moderate exercises, tobacco and alcohol control and psychological balance. According to the study by the World Health Organization, living style and behaviors account for as much as 60% among the four factors influencing individuals’ health and life expectancy. Therefore, promoting healthy living for all is one of the key links to promote the health of the human being, a pilot and basic work for preventing and controlling various diseases, an important approach to improving health literacy of the citizens and the average social labor productivity, as well as an important means to helping building healthy China.

The first is the challenge brought about by continuous decline in economic growth. Correspondently social security revenue and financial support to social security will also shift from rapid rise to stable and limited growth. With increasing rise in the need for social security and rapid increase in medical cost, pressure on social security funds is increasingly tremendous which will challenge social security continuously. The second is the challenge intensified by increased aging population. Aging population and low birth rate will impose impact on both revenue and expenditure of the old-age insurance and the medical insurance, leading to lack of medical insurance funds and weakened security capacity on the one hand, rapid rise in the need for medical care and dramatic increase in the expenditure of medical insurance funds on the other hand, which will pose increasingly serious risks for the sustainable development of the medical security system. The third is the challenge caused by increasingly accelerated pace of urbanization. Urbanization will not only give rise to rapid increase in demands for social security, which imposes pressure on social security funds, but also demands unity of urban and rural social security. Urbanization, together with its growing mobility of the population, poses a new challenge for the management service of social security. The fourth is the challenge posed by the multiple methods of medical service delivery and the application of network information technology. Multiple medical service delivery methods and tremendous impact of Internet+ will greatly change the service delivery modes and organizational structure, which will have fundamental influence on the operation of medical institutions and medical service practice and present huge challenges for medical security management.

The “Outline for Strengthening International Exchanges and Cooperation” has made in-depth expositions on strengthening international exchanges and cooperation and actively participating in global health governance. It has clearly defined the key areas and mechanisms for promoting international exchanges and cooperation in the future and indicated that China will play a more active and constructive role in global health governance, and earnestly fulfill its international commitments and actively assume the responsibility of a big country. This is of great significance to creating a good international environment for building a healthy China, building a community of shared interests, a community of shared responsibilities and a community of shared destiny for human health, and promoting the global achievement of the 2030 health-related sustainable development goals.

Deepening patriotic public health campaigns is a great creation and successful practice by applying the mass line to the preventive sanitation work. It is also an important part of socialism with Chinese characteristics. The “Outline of the Healthy China 2030 Plan” regulates that patriotic public health campaigns should be deepen, urban and rural environment and sanitary conditions should be comprehensively improved, healthy cities, towns and villages should be built. “Building healthy cities, towns and villages” is an important project for Healthy China. The land supply for public health infrastructure should be secured, and health-related infrastructure, planning and standards should be improved. We will blend health in the urban and rural planning, construction and management process, to improve the coordinated development of the urban development and residents’ health. By 2030, a group of healthy cities, towns and villages will be built for nationwide demonstration.

Major diseases refer to the illnesses that severely endanger public health and life safety of the people, severely affect the national economy and the development of society, and severely impair national security and our international image. Based on the characteristics of the present stage, five categories of 18 major diseases are selected as the representatives of major diseases, i.e. infectious diseases (AIDS, TB, hepatitis B, schistosomiasis, malaria, plague, cholera, echinococcosis, brucellosis), chronic diseases (hypertension, cerebral apoplexy, diabetes, lung cancer, liver cancer), mental diseases (severe psychonosema), occupational disease (pneumoconiosis) and endemic diseases (iodine deficiency disorders, Kaschin-Beck disease).

The CPC central committee and the State Council have attached great importance to environmental protection by putting it in the main position and making it the main force of ecological civilization construction and the core content of building a beautiful China, realizing a sustainable development, introducing an overall plan for the reform of the ecological civilization system, implementing the action plan for the prevention and control of air, water and soil pollution, and vigorously strengthening environment and health work. In 2015, the average annual concentration of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) in 338 prefecture-level and above cities was 50 μg/m3; the proportion of the 1940 state-controlled sections of class I–III surface water increased to 66%; the proportion of worse V fell to 9.7%; the quality of the main streams in major rivers was obviously improved. The capacities of national desulfurization and denitrification units, accounting for the total installed capacity of coal power, increased to 99% and 92% respectively, which completed the ultra-low emission transformation of 160 million kilowatts of coal-fired power units. The comprehensive environment improvement in 72,000 villages has been implemented, directly benefiting more than 120 million rural people. A number of major ecological conservation and rehabilitation projects have been carried out steadily, including natural forest protection, returning farmland into forest and grass, and grazing land into grassland, shelter forest system construction, protection and restoration of lakes and wetlands, desertification control, water and soil conservation, desertification management, wildlife protection and nature reserve construction. Pollutant emissions of the five heavy metals of lead, mercury, cadmium, chromium and arsenic have fallen 27.7% since 2007, and the number of sudden environment incidents involving heavy metals has been greatly reduced. In order to solve the environmental problems that harm people’s health, the Environment Protection Law and the series of environmental management documents clearly put forward the requirements for strengthening environment and health management, which provide legal and policy basis for the establishment and the improvement of environment and health management systems, organization and the implementation of environment and health surveys, monitoring and risk assessment.

Strengthening organization and implementation to build a healthy China, is a major strategic task to cover modernization construction of our country. Strengthening organization and implementation is the key to ensuring the effective implementation of the goals and tasks of the Healthy China construction, and the key to transforming the blueprint into the effective improvement of people health. For the goal of on building moderately prosperous society by 2020, it has great significance to realize the Two Centenary Goals and the Chinese dream of the great rejuvenation of China. The Outline proposed that organization and leadership should be strengthened, and the evaluation system of health impact assessment should be established, to create a good social atmosphere and carry out the conduct monitoring work.

As the core of the Plan, the target indicators for building a healthy China are a high degree of conciseness and summary of the development tasks and the fundamental basis for the implementation of all major tasks and major policies. With clear orientation and constraints, they are of great importance to strengthening the binding force of the Outline and ensuring the implementation of the Outline. The main targets and indicators of the Outline are supposed to closely focus on the national strategy of building a moderately prosperous society in an all-round way and achieving the “two centenary goals.” Moreover, they need to fully consider the convergence with the goals of various stages of economic and social development, and with the requirements of the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. In this way the international comparability of indicators will be improved. The combination of taking a long-term perspective and focusing on the present must be adhered to, with consideration given to both guidance and maneuverability. It will be necessary to put an emphasis on the overall importance and representativeness of the main indicators, and to ensure that the indicators are clearly defined. With a stable source of data, the indicators will be measured, decomposed, and assessed, in order to make the annual data and provincial data accessible and to meet the requirements for the monitoring and evaluation of the Outline. Thus the binding force and maneuverability of the Outline will be guaranteed.

Firstly, the rapid development of urbanization has led to an increasing population of agricultural transfer. In 1978–2015, the urbanization rate in China increased by around 1.03 percentage points annually on average. In 2015, the total number of rural migrant workers reached 277.47 million, an increase of 35.24 million over 2010 (Fig. 3.1).

Health and longevity are not only the core objective of human development, but also the common wishes of people of all ethnic groups in our country. Healthy China is the China where the people can enjoy health and longevity and also the China where the people’s health and health service capacity have reached the world advanced level. From the following three dimensions—healthy life, quality of health and health capacity, Healthy China will provide the behavioral guidance and policy basis for individuals, families, health-related institutions, government departments and other entities to jointly construct a healthy China where people can enjoy health and longevity and where the economy and the society can carry each other.

With the construction of health information service system in the past 10 years or so and the rapid development of information technology and the Internet, the development trend of cross-border integration has been highlighted. Many new industry types have emerged such as smart manufacturing, online consumption and mobile healthcare. These new industry types are profoundly influencing and changing the organization of large-scale social production and people’s lifestyles. In the next 15 years, the cross-border integration of information technology and the Internet will continue, but what will be the trend? What changes in people’s health needs will take place when this trend is superimposed on the steady increase in urban and rural income levels, moderate population growth, aggravating population aging problems and other factors? What impact will these changes have on the health service supply and the development of the whole health industry? To sort out these issues will be of great significance to advancing the construction of “healthy China” and to the coordinated development of China’s economy and society and the attainment of the goal of “200 Years.”

Making improving the drug supply security system as an important task, the Outline of the Healthy China 2030 Plan requires to deepen the reform of the drug and device circulation system and to improve the national drug policies. The construction of drug supply security system is one of the key tasks of the new round of healthcare reform and, together with the medical service system, the medical security system and the public health service system, it serves the goal of providing basic medical and health services for everyone. The national essential drug system was initially established during the “11th 5-Year” period, which has laid the foundation for the formation of a drug supply security system. During the “12th 5-Year” period, positive progress has been made in consolidating and improving the essential drug system and promoting reform in the field of drug production and circulation.

From now to 2030, China’s economic level, service consumption, population development, scientific and technological progress will undergo profound changes, which will present the following main features

The next 15 years is the important turning stage for China’s demographic development, the important stage of opportunity for improving family planning policies and promoting the long-term balanced demographic development, and the critical stage of reform for building Healthy China and laying solid foundations for realizing the Chinese dream of national rejuvenation. It is of great significance to consider the overall situation and aim far, research on the demographic development, grasp the objective laws, use the international experience, improve strategy and promote the balanced development.