Development of China's private healthcare providers under the governments' encouragement and guiding policies / 中国卫生政策研究

ABSTRACT

Objective:The main objective of this study is to analyze the development trend of China's private healthcare providers since the issue of Document No. 58 by the General Office of the State Council in the year 2010. It intends to evaluate the effectiveness of the policy on encouragement and guidance to private healthcare. Methods:(1) Using the statistical data collected from national and provincial healthcare yearbook, we made a comparative a-nalysis on seven indicators regarding the development of private healthcare providers, including the number of health-care providers, the number of beds, the number of healthcare professionals, annual outpatient diagnose-and-treat per-son-times, annual inpatient hospitalization person-times, bed utilization rate and average length of stay for two periods of time (i. e. 2006—2010 and 2011—2015). (2) A field study was conducted to six selected provinces. In these provinces, essential information of the related policy was collected, held stakeholder interviews and focus group dis-cussions among hospital management team and medical workers and visits to several typical private providers were made to understand the policy effectiveness and existing problems. The study also tried to find the key factors for a successful private healthcare provider in China. Results:(1) The results show that since the issue of Document No. 58 in the year 2010 , the number of China's private healthcare providers has greatly increased while the scale and service capabilities of private providers still need to be improved. (2) As per the results again, a great difference ex-ists between provinces in terms of private healthcare provider development during 2010 to 2015 . Conclusion:A posi-tive impact of government regulation on the development of private healthcare providers was noticed. However, China's private healthcare providers are still facing many invisible obstacles and challenges. The government needs to put more focus on building a cross-department coordination and supporting regulation system to advance the sustain-able development of private healthcare providers. Moreover, the government needs to cautiously promote the Public-Private-Partnership ( PPP) to improve the effective allocation of resources in the healthcare market and provide essen-tial support to private healthcare providers in solving the problems they meet during their development process.