China’s health and family planning prospects

Updated: 2016-05-20

The Fourth Session of the 12th National People's Congress approved in March the 13th Five-year Plan for economic and social development, formulating reforms for China’s health sector over the next five years to build a healthier China, which means improving medical services and increasing medical resources.

The purpose of the Healthy China strategy is to improve people’s health to help build an overall well-off society.

Under the 13th Five-year Plan, the development of  the Healthy China strategy will center on safeguarding people’s health and be powered by deepened healthcare reforms. The country will attach more importance to disease prevention and health improvement while the health sector will shift its focus from treating diseases to maintaining health.

The strategy aims to set up a basic medical care system that covers urban and rural people by 2020, strengthen legislation on medical and health care, improve medical services and raise the public’s health awareness. Efforts will be made to provide multi-level medical care and services to ensure that everybody enjoys basic healthcare while raising the average life expectancy to 77.34, lowering infant mortality  to 7.5 out of 1,000, the mortality of children below the age of 5 to 9.5 out of 1,000, and maternal mortalities to 18 out of every 100,000.