Comprehensive reform to improve the performance management of primary health care service in rural China / 中国卫生政策研究

ABSTRACT

With the support of World Bank ( WB ) and UK Department for International Development ( DFID) , China Rural Health Project ( hereinafter referred as Health XI Project) began to introduce the idea of performance management to 40 counties in 8 provinces in 2008 . The project implemented cyclic performance manage-ment strategies, including performance planning, performance communication, performance evaluation and perform-ance improvement. With the continuous improvement of performance as the goal, the project attempted to establish incentive mechanisms based on the performance of health care services. After five years of pilots in 40 counties, it has achieved good results in the aspects of improving the quality and efficiency of health care services, motivating the enthusiasm of health care managers and workers, etc. Moreover, it has successfully built several advanced counties with exemplary performance management and accumulated some experience, which provides reference and demonstra-tion for implementing performance management in other areas. The key experiences of implementing performance management of rural primary health care include taking health care quality as the core of performance, appropriately combining economic and non-economic incentives, encouraging personnel participation in performance management in order to ensure the sustainability of performance improvement, and effectively applying the ideology of systematic per-formance management in order to effectively enhance the management level of hospitals. The paper also puts forward some policy suggestions based on emerging issues during implementation of performance management.