china''s unique challenge - The People''s Health
The People's Health

China’s Unique Challenge: Healthcare for Billions

An insight into China’s struggle to provide healthcare to the most populous country in the world.

Editor’s note: This film is no longer available to view online.

Over the past decades, China’s authorities have been experimenting with different forms of healthcare systems. As living standards rise and society ages rapidly, the country has been struggling to provide healthcare to its 1.4 billion people.

China has the world’s largest population and its busiest hospitals. Eighty percent of Chinese patients turn up at big hospitals as their first port of call for even minor illnesses – and thus have to wait sometimes for days to get treatment.

With unique access, we go to the frontline of one of China’s oldest hospitals, Peking Union Medical College Hospital in Beijing, and a pioneering new primary health centre, to see how reforms are playing out on the ground.

We meet patients seeking treatment as well as doctors and nurses delivering care, including a former “barefoot doctor” brought out of retirement and other outreach doctors.

While access to doctors is made easier and cheaper in the big city hospitals, the government’s massive rural health insurance scheme has given health coverage to 700 million peasants, who previously had to pay for all their own medical care.

We follow a young peasant boy who, together with his whole family, travels from the far north to Beijing for life-saving treatment, partly funded by his family’s health insurance.

Challenges abound but this massive country is looking at some innovative ways to try to deliver the People’s Health across China. It is a unique challenge of scale: How to provide healthcare to the most populous country in the world.