Summary

China’s General Office of the State Council has issued a guideline to promote innovation in medical education. The guideline is broadly similar to the country’s previous policy in this area but also sets out several new objectives and areas of focus.

Some highlighted areas of the new guideline are:

• Improve the level of medical professional education. Develop professional training for nursing at the higher vocational education level, establish professional education in undergraduate clinical medicine and Chinese medicine, and expand the enrollment scale of postgraduate students.
• Promote the development of disciplines such as anesthesia, infection, critical care medicine and pediatrics.
• Strengthen the general practice (GP) education for all medical students, develop about 100 national medical practice teaching demonstration bases. Expand the enrollment scale of master's degrees in this subject.
• Speed up the construction of a high-level public health personnel training system. To develop and establish a number of high-level public health colleges/institutions, to place the professional master’s degree as the main training scheme for postgraduate education in public health, create and develop professional doctoral degree education in public health.
• Promote the interdisciplinary collaboration of medicine with engineering, science, and humanities studies, to develop the innovative training of talents with a multidisciplinary background of "medical + X" model, and carry out the reform of advanced basic medicine and pharmaceutical personnel training.
• Carry out reform in medical teaching, increase training on public health, preventive health care, infectious disease prevention etc.for the medical students. Promote the Chinese medical education to train talents with integrated knowledge of both Chinese and western medicine.
• Develop comprehensive quality assessment system for the medical education. Advance the professional certification mechanism for medical education to establish a certification system with international recognition for the medical subjects.
• Promote the development for interdisciplinary integration model of “medical + X”. With the focus on areas of life health, clinical diagnosis, bio-security and medicine innovation etc., support collaborations among medical education and artificial intelligence, materials, chemistry and biology.

Analysis by Kevin Prest, Senior Analyst, IES

As noted above, the main objectives of the new guidance are broadly in line with existing medical education policy under plans such as Healthy China 2030. It calls for continued expansion in the scale of medical training, improved teaching quality, more attention to professional development of doctors and nurses, and a greater focus on general practice, public health and several other key areas such as anesthesia and pediatrics.

Key differences include a greater focus on interdisciplinarity and public health, the addition of infectious diseases and critical care to the list of specialisms where particular attention should be paid, and improvements in general practice training for all medical students as opposed to just a goal to increase the number of general practitioners.

This policy looks at medical education rather than medical research and is unlikely to lead to any major new specific opportunities for UK HEIs, but its priorities may affect institutions that are cooperating with Chinese universities in the medical field or those that plan to do so.

Sources

1. http://www.moe.gov.cn/jyb_xwfb/s5147/202009/t20200923_490165.html

2. http://www.moe.gov.cn/jyb_xwfb/s271/202009/t20200923_490126.html