Policy framework and components for general practice-based gatekeeping and referral system / 中国卫生政策研究

ABSTRACT

Gatekeeping and referral system are core institutional arrangements in health resource allocation which regulate the consumers’ entry points and their fluxion in the healthcare service delivery system. Hiding behind such arrangements are numerous stakeholders and their sophisticated interactions of obligation, responsibility and ben-efits. For this reason, it is of great importance to build a more systematic and integrated policy framework to promote and impoverish the gatekeeping and referral system. This paper puts forward the definition of“general practice-based gatekeeping and referral system” and revealed the political values embedded in it. We then identified the ten essen-tial components for policy implementation based on this definition. For each component, we recognized the involved actors, and elaborated their obligations, boundaries and interactions. This ten-component policy framework could be used in the international comparison research as a map, guiding the implementation of gatekeeping and referral system.