The shortage of health workforce in rural and remote areas has been commonly concerned by every country around the word. It is one of world health issues, challenging the aspirations of achieving equity. In this regard, WHO developed the Global Policy Recommendations to improve the accessibility of the health workforce in rural and remote areas through improved retention. This article focuses on the key steps of the policy guideline developed from evidence-based medicine methodology and from angle of guideline development, mainly about background, issues, evidence retrieval and selection, quality grading of evidence, and the forming of recommendation plan, in order to further explore how to correctly understand, obtain, evaluate and apply currently available research evidence, and how to use the GRADE system to make scientific and feasible recommendations in the decision-making process, emphasizing the importance of evidence and the GRADE system in the evidence-based health decision-making.
Objective To systematically review and conclude the healthcare reform policy in rural China throughout the past 62 years. Methods This study was applied with PICOS structure to formulate research issues. National/ministry policies and documents on healthcare reform in rural China were systematically collected. The primary healthcare issues and healthcare reform measures carried out at each stage were studied, and, the criteria as population healthcare indicators, indicators for healthcare workforce and infrastructure in rural areas, healthcare expenditure indicators, and the results of national surveys for healthcare service were used to evaluate the reform performance achieved at each stage. Results A total 396 national policies on healthcare reform in rural China were included through comprehensive search. In accordance with the results of quantitative analysis on literatures, characteristics of economy system reform at each stage as well as actual advancement on healthcare reform, the reform courses of healthcare system in rural China in this study were divided into six periods as follows: national economy recovery and adjustment period, cultural revolution period, early stage of economy system transition, initial stage of healthcare reform, middle stage of healthcare reform, and implement stage for new rural cooperative medical system (NRCMS). The average policies of each period increased year by year, which generally showed as features as laying more emphasis on medical services than medicine, and thinking little of medical insurance. The population health indicators, sickbeds per thousand rural population and medical practitioners kept improving gradually. Yet the import of market mechanism and influence of international economy condition led to the decline in public welfare of healthcare system, increase of personal expenditure proportion among general healthcare cost, and duplicate content among some polices.Conclusion Commonwealth orientation is the fundamental principal to fulfill healthcare service system, thus performance on policies should be concluded in combination with the present national conditions, future requirements as well as evidence-based policy-making, and additionally, such performance should be improved during implementation.
Objective To evaluate the related laws, regulations and guidelines about off-label drug use in several countries, so as to provide evidence for regulating off-label drug use in China. Methods The following 3 Chinese databases as CBM, CNKI and VIP, 11 foreign databases including EMbase, PubMed and so on, 15 countries’ official websites of pharmaceutical administration department or academic organization, and WHO website were searched to obtain the related laws, regulations and guidelines about off-label drug use. By adopting the system evaluation method and self-defined index evaluation, the quality of the included literatures was evaluated in three aspects: literatures’ type, content relevance and timeliness. Seven researchers independently extracted data by Excel which included basic information of literatures, preconditions of off-label drug use, medicines categories that could be off-labelly used, regulations and legal responsibility in off-label drug use. And finally the descriptive analysis was conducted. Results A total of 4 735 literatures were retrieved, 104 of which were finally included, including 89 at grade A quality level (85.58%) and 15 was at grade B (14.42%). The analysis showed that, a) Seven countries had laws related to off-label drug use: America, Germany, Italy, Netherland, New Zealand, India and Japan. Except India, the rational off-label drug use was allowed in the other 6 countries. The right to prescribe off-label drug was defined in Britain and Ireland; b) Medical staff had to take the responsibility of off-label drug use in the country where the duty regulations were formulated; and c) Ten countries published guidelines or statements related to off label drug use by their official departments and academic organizations. And the regulation included the following procedures: firstly, to obtain the relative information and evidence; secondly, to get the informed consent; thirdly, to be approved by the ethics committee and/or pharmacy administration committee; fourthly, to record the reasons and effectiveness of off-label use; fifthly, to monitor the adverse reactions of off-label drug use. Besides monitoring the medical institutes, the pharmaceutical companies had also be monitored which included the following 3 aspects: a) to require companies to train specialized staffs to answer the questions related to off-label drug use; b) to open the contact information of medical departments of companies; and c) to prohibit preaching and advertising the off-label drug use. Conclusion Off-label drug use has its rationality and necessity. To protect the safety of patients, avoid the risk for hospitals and medical staffs, it requires formulating relative regulations soon in order to manage the off-label drug use in China. As a developing country, China is different from the developed countries in health care system. Therefore, when formulating the regulations, it is necessary to perform evidence-based evaluation on each country’s laws, regulations and guidelines about off-label drug use, with Chinese national conditions and experts’ opinions in combination. After a regulation is preliminarily drawn up, it needs to be put into pilot practice, and then revised and spread to the whole country.
China has accumulated abundant experience on how to deal with post-disaster mental problem in recent years. However, the relevant concepts about post-disaster mental health services, detailed contents and process of the services were still incomplete. In order to provide guidance for the implementation of post-disaster mental health services, optimize service process, and improve service experience, the development of management practice of post-disaster mental health service is warranted. The authors give some suggestions on developing the management practice.
Informed-evidence decision-making (IEDM) has emerged as the predominant principle of providing guidance for policy-making and practice, however, the best available evidences requisite of performing successfully IEDM. Different forms of evidence and different kinds of review questions call for the development of new approaches that are designed to more effectively and rigorously identify and synthesize the evidence. Fourteen methods of reviewing literature have been recently used to identify and synthesize evidence, of which scoping reviews is increasing popular. This article introduces aspects such as background, purpose and methodological frame work and explains the process of it with an example so that facilitating the dissemination and utilization of scoping review in China.
National Center for Medical Service Administration of National Health and Family Planning Commission of China was established at the beginning of 2015. It is mainly in charge of developing and managing standards of medical technology and organizing their implementation, and giving technical guidance and consulting for evaluation of medical institutions. The foundation of the center fills in the blank of lacking central administrative department of the guideline development and evaluation. This paper introduces the definition and the function of clinical practice guideline, and analyzes the current situation, problems and challenges of domestic guidelines, and proposes some potential suggestions on improving the quality of Chinese guidelines from national level for promoting the standardization, scientification and transparency of clinical practice guidelines in China.
Real-world evidence represents critical evidence to support post-marketing drug monitoring, assessment and policy decisions, and has received extensive attentions. However, an explicit over-arching design and conceptual framework for this specific area is lacking. Divergent opinions on the production of real world evidence are often present among researchers; and understanding about their implications also differ among policy makers and evidence users. In this article, we have proposed, from the regulatory and clinical perspectives, a conceptual framework on the use of real world data for post-marketing drug studies, assessment and policy decisions.
This paper introduces the development and changes of clinical practice guidelines based on the enlightenment of the Reporting Items for Practice Guidelines in Health Care (RIGHT), and provides policy recommendations.
To introduce the definition, applicable scenarios, methodology and examples of mixed methods systematic reviews, aiming to promote the application of mixed methods in China and to help clinical decision-makers to select appropriate qualitative results from systematic reviews to guide clinical practice.
As an important part of social governance, the health poverty alleviation plays a key role in promoting Healthy China Strategy. This paper reviews the practice progress of health poverty alleviation in China, and summarizes it's four action logics. It is found that the governance effect is restrained by several issues, such as pessimistically external governance environment, single governance subject, poor leading role of the pilot areas, specific practices inconsistent with conceptions, and the research has not paid enough attention to the incentive system and supervision mechanism of the practitioners. Based on the above, this paper proposes five governance principles on the governance of health and poverty alleviation: evidence-based principle, systematic principle, economic principle, dynamic principle and people-oriented principle. Lastly, we hope to provide some preferences to promote the governance practice of health poverty alleviation.