Research on implementation status and key issues of function fulfillment in China national medical centers and national regional medical centers / 中华医院管理杂志

ABSTRACT

China national medical centers and national regional medical centers are the key entities to expand the availability of quality medical resources and ensure they are better distributed among regions. It is of great significance for the centers′ high-quality development to understand the key issues in the construction and progression of centers by evaluating the performance of their function fulfillment. The evaluation framework of this study was based on the " structure-process-outcome" model. The study was divided into three stages, including centers′ self-evaluation, data reporting, and on-site investigation and evaluation. The team conducted the evaluation on 15 entity hospitals supporting 6 national medical centers and 5 national regional medical centers that had been approved by October 2020. As the results showed, the funding and policy support for these centers from governments at all levels were increased, the internal and external management mechanism of the centers were preliminarily set up, the functions of the centers were executed properly, and the " radiation effect" of the centers was in place gradually. The key problems hindering the fulfillment of functions concern the mechanisms that were not sound and need to be further refined, which included the field of financial investment and policy guarantee for the entity hospitals, internal and external management of centers, introduction and cultivaton of the talented, and the innovation and transformation of scientific achievements which facilitates breakthroughs in core technologies. To promote the efficient implementation of functional tasks of the centers, the authors proposed four suggestions. First, the " commission and province co-construction" mechanism should be further improved to augment investment and policy guarantee from the government. Second, the internal organization and management mechanism of each centers should be optimized. Third, the reform and innovation in the training and management system of the talented medical personnel should be accelerated. Last, the health needs oriented mechanism for scientific research innovation and achievements transformation should be established.