A team from the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) visited Northwest China's Qinghai province from May 17 to 20 to survey work on grassroots healthcare services. Zhu Yongxin, vice-chairman of the CPPCC National Committee and executive vice-chairman of the China Association for Promoting Democracy Central Committee, led the survey.

The team went to the cities of Xining and Haidong, where they visited medical institutions across the five administrative levels of- province, city, county, township and village. They talked with healthcare workers, patients and local government officials to gain a detailed understanding of local situations on healthcare services.

The team acknowledged Qinghai's efforts in giving strategic priority to ensuring the people's health and focusing on strengthening grassroots healthcare, particularly through the development of tightly-knit urban medical groups and county-level medical consortia. Progress has been made in enhancing disease prevention, treatment and health management at the grassroots level, as well as in the development of plateau medicine work, they noted.

The team emphasized the need to strengthen the responsibility of governments at all levels and increase support for the development of grassroots healthcare systems. They called for channeling more premium resources and priorities to the grassroots level, advancing the building of the medical consortia, improving the systems of medical insurance and pricing policy, optimizing reimbursement ratio and health insurance payment models, and ensuring the orderly referral of patients with common, chronic, and rehabilitative diseases to grassroots healthcare settings. 

The team also suggested exploring new models to enhance the capabilities of grassroots healthcare services by leveraging artificial intelligence, and breaking through bottlenecks in primary healthcare resource supply through optimizing diagnostic assistance systems, building intelligent health monitoring networks, and using smart data analysis.