Health Policy and Systems Sciences

China, like all nations, faces a daunting array of traditional and emerging health problems.  Meeting these challenges requires a well-coordinated, highly functioning health system: a set of interlocking components such as health planning and governance, disease prevention and health promotion, health care service delivery, health workforce, medical technologies, and health information.

How can China put these components into effective, efficient, and equitable practice? One approach is through a better understanding of health policy and systems sciences, which integrate interdisciplinary knowledge from fields such as clinical medicine and public health, ethics and politics, economics and political science, and evaluation methods combined with modeling and organizational theory.

This is new territory for many of China’s health professionals. To build capacity in this field, CMB is supporting projects that will generate knowledge, advance education, and/or lead to innovative applications in four areas: changing health problems and disease burdens; health policies in finance, human resources, information, or technologies; innovations in health systems operations and management; and China’s connections to global health. Through grants in these areas, CMB aims to enhance the knowledge, methods, and tools to improve health policies and systems performance in China.