China Pushes Convenient Nearby Healthcare Access

China is accelerating a nationwide effort to make medical care more convenient and accessible close to home, a push aimed at easing the burden on residents who currently travel to major hospitals for routine diagnosis and treatment. In a front-page feature published Tuesday, 13 October 2026, People’s Daily detailed three regional case studies that operationalize a State Council policy directive issued earlier this year.

The initiative rests on the principle of jiujin jiubian — receiving care that is nearby and close at hand. It is anchored in a document the State Council issued on April 6, 2026, titled “Several Measures on Accelerating the Construction of the Graded Diagnosis and Treatment System.”

The Policy Foundation

The State Council’s directive sets out 13 measures across four areas. Its stated purpose is to meet the public’s demand for convenient, nearby medical care, supported by the medical-and-health Strong Foundation Project.

The measures call for building tightly integrated medical consortiums, with tertiary hospitals focusing on critical and complex diseases while gradually reducing ordinary chronic-disease outpatient services. They aim to guide residents toward grassroots first-contact care for common and chronic illnesses, strengthen referral management, and create insurance and pricing incentives that favor lower-level facilities.

Key provisions include allowing grassroots clinics to issue long prescriptions of up to 12 weeks for qualifying chronic-disease patients, reserving appointment and bed quotas for referrals, and setting medical-insurance reimbursements that differ by roughly 10 percentage points between care levels. The document sets a target of basically establishing the graded-diagnosis coordination mechanism by 2030.

Three Models in Practice

The People’s Daily feature illustrates the policy through three distinct regional approaches.

Shanghai: Medical-Companion Services for the Elderly

Shanghai has rolled out citywide professional medical-companion services for its elderly population, which numbered 5.84 million people aged 60 and over at the end of 2025. A pilot plan issued in January 2025 by the Shanghai Civil Affairs Bureau and Health Commission was tested in the Pudong, Yangpu, Songjiang, and Xuhui districts.

Renji Hospital, affiliated with Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, was among the first public hospitals to introduce the service through the Pu Lao Hui platform. It began with 15 bookings in its first month, grew to more than 3,000 orders after a year of cooperation, and surpassed 10,000 orders in September 2026. In July 2026, the city scaled the program up so that all residents aged 60 and above are eligible, regardless of household registration status, with more than 300 elderly-care institutions now providing the service.

“Luckily there was a companion-diagnosis specialist to help,” said Zhou Ayi, a 79-year-old patient, recalling how the helper relayed symptoms to doctors and guided her through payment, testing, and follow-up. “Elderly people often have several conditions to see at once.”

Jiangsu: Integrated Chronic-Disease Clinics

In Jiangsu, the township clinic on the Yangtze river island of Shiye, in Zhenjiang’s Dantu District, has built an integrated chronic-disease model. The island is home to more than 7,000 residents, over half of them elderly, making medical access a big matter for a small island, as the report put it.

Xi Jinping inspected the Shiye clinic in December 2014, calling for medical resources to be channeled downward to the grassroots. Today, the clinic shares resources with Zhenjiang First People’s Hospital through joint clinics, two-way referrals, and imaging diagnosis.

Its chronic-disease screening-and-prevention center maintains data on 2,074 patients, operates seven specialized screening devices, and has conducted 1,479 general population screenings and 447 high-risk screenings. It has provided exercise and nutrition interventions to 520 priority individuals. Jiangsu had built 120 such centers across the province by the end of 2025, while promoting a point-and-order family-doctor contracting model.

“Through establishing the screening-and-prevention center, we have basically achieved precise chronic-disease management for all township residents,” said clinic director Zhao Guoqiang.

Yunnan: Flexible and Off-Hours Clinics

Yunnan has encouraged medical institutions to open flexible clinics, adding lunchtime, evening, weekend, and holiday sessions at peak times. Yan’an Hospital in Kunming has offered night clinics for nearly three years, with the same services available day and night — including optometry, eye-pressure, and fundus examinations — and all support departments such as the laboratory, radiology, ultrasound, and pharmacy open at night.

“Yan’an Hospital opened night clinics precisely to make it more convenient for people to see a doctor,” said Huang Ying, the hospital’s outpatient director.

One elderly diabetes patient, Li Yishu, said the quieter evening hours allowed more time for communication with physicians. Across Yunnan, public institutions at level two and above now operate 439 weekend clinics, 392 lunchtime clinics, and 321 night clinics.

Analysis: A Vision of the 15-Minute Medical Circle

The People’s Daily feature is notable for its structure: three parallel vignettes, each pairing an individual patient story with cumulative statistics and a guiding quotation from Xi Jinping. This framing reflects the government’s effort to present the graded-diagnosis policy not as an abstract bureaucratic reform but as a set of tangible improvements to daily life.

The through-line connecting the three cases — elderly companion services, chronic-disease management, and off-hours clinics — is a national push toward a 15-minute medical and medical-insurance circle, in which essential services are reachable within a short trip from home. The timing is significant: 2026 is the opening year of China’s 15th Five-Year Plan, and the Strong Foundation Project features prominently in provincial work plans.

The reform also implies a significant shift in hospital operations. Tertiary hospitals are directed to reduce ordinary chronic-disease and stable-condition outpatient services, concentrating instead on critical and complex cases. Ensuring that grassroots facilities can match the quality patients have come to expect from major hospitals — and building public trust in them — remains the central challenge.

What’s Next

The success of the initiative will depend on whether grassroots clinics can attract and retain qualified personnel, and whether insurance and pricing incentives are strong enough to change long-established patient habits. The State Council has set 2030 as the milestone for the graded-diagnosis mechanism to be basically established, with referral centers expected to achieve full coverage by 2027.

The companion-diagnosis profession in Shanghai, meanwhile, is a new field raising questions about standardization and pricing — the city’s plan bans scalping of appointments, signaling awareness of potential abuses.

For now, the direction is clear: China is betting that bringing care closer to home will ease the strain on its largest hospitals and deliver the nearby, fair, accessible, systematic and continuous health services the leadership has promised.