Harvard China Health Partnership
The Harvard China Health Partnership (HCHP) is a university-wide initiative dedicated to advancing scholarship on China’s health system, evaluating and designing health policy interventions, and improving health care in China.
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Inaugural Health Policy and System Training in Chengdu
The Harvard China Health Partnership (HCHP) completed its inaugural course in the Health Policy and System Training Series. Renowned scholars from over ten Chinese universities—which have had decades of collaboration with HCHP—joined in Chengdu, Sichuan province from July 8 to 11, 2024 to participate in this four-day course for a training and discussion that connected frontiers of knowledge worldwide.
Kicking off with a “Health System Frameworks” introductory session, the first half of the course revolved around health system framework jointly developed by the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the World Bank, and featured in the book Getting Health Reform Right. Course instructors Professor Winnie Yip, Professor William Hsiao, Professor Michael Reich, and Professor Yali Cong introduced the technical, political, and ethical aspects of health system design.
Following the theoretical framework was a series of country-specific sessions that examined the application and limitations of theories in real-life scenarios. Unique experience from the United Kingdom, Germany, Australia, Thailand, and India were examined through the lens of the control knobs, with in-depth analysis of how the different designs in the health systems contributed to different outcomes. Lively discussion during the sessions further connected these international experience and lessons with the context of China, providing a comparative analysis of the Chinese health system’s achievements and challenges against those abroad.
The final session of the course was dedicated to group presentations from the participating experts. Drawing from both theory and practice, the groups each identified and diagnosed a remaining challenge in China’s health system, and provided multi-pronged, practical solutions that address the root causes of the challenge. Following this inaugural course, HCHP will continue this series of health system and policy training in the years ahead for public health scholars across China.
