On June 4, an online training center for health and family planning monitoring was officially launched. Chen Xiaohong, vice-minister of the National Health and Family Planning Commission (NHFPC), attended the launching ceremony and delivered an important speech about improving online training for health and family planning monitoring. Xue Xiaolin, director-general of the Bureau of Inspection and Supervision under the NHFPC, hosted the ceremony. Heads of the NHFPC’s departments and the National Center for Health Inspection and Supervision (NCHIS) also attended the event.

Chen Xiaohong confirmed the achievements in building the online training center. He pointed out that health and family planning monitoring is of critical importance as it directly affects people’s health, as well as the implementation of relevant laws and regulations. He said that building a strong health and family planning monitoring team is crucial to promoting health and family planning work.

Chen emphasized that monitoring health and family planning depends and should focus on the community level. Therefore, the key to training monitoring teams is to continuously improve the executive ability of monitoring personnel. He said that an online training center is a great solution to problems such as a tight budget and teacher shortage. For years, the supervision bureau and the NCHIS had been working on building the center, developing course resources and managing organizations. They tested the platform and proved that it was standardized, reliable and rich in resources. Meanwhile, online training has the advantage of sustainability, wide coverage, low cost and high quality, laying a solid foundation for building strong monitoring teams at the community level.

Chen required that infrastructure construction and organization must be strengthened in order to improve the quality of training. Work must be done to increase the budget for the online training platform and promote projects of informationizing health and family planning monitoring, especially the online training platform. Hardware equipment and network conditions must be improved to ensure the online training runs smoothly.

The supervision bureau and the NCHIS developed the online training center for health and family planning monitoring. To date, the center has 362 courses with a total of 412 credits. It has 79,000 users and covers provinces, cities and counties nationwide.