A new chapter of China-Czech Republic health cooperation

Source: en.nhfpc.gov.cn

Updated: 2015-06-15

In today's world, globalization has increased cross-border health risks and no country can really be immune on its own so a joint effort is needed. The Ebola outbreaks in West Africa last year posed a challenge to health responders and coordination of all countries. And, although China and the Czech Republic have different national conditions, they share similar health problems. For example, how to improve medical and healthcare systems to make them more efficient and improve benefits in a lackluster global economy, or how to improve fundraising to offer more reliable health care to the public or how to increase the health system’s responsiveness to deal with threats from traditional, emerging and recurrent infectious diseases. Both countries have to increase health cooperation for winning results.

China will push for greater health cooperation with the Czech Republic and increase government and nongovernment health exchanges at various levels and through various channels. The range of cooperation will be expanded and have more diverse forms and China hopes that medical institutes, scientific research institutions, universities, and nongovernment organizations can establish sites for cooperation in academic studies, scientific research, medical technology, and information and personnel exchanges to make health cooperation a new highlight in Sino-Czech relations.

There will be greater bilateral medical and healthcare system reforms and the Czech Republic has a lot of experience and many methods for drug supervision, improved medical care, and the integration of medical institutes and teaching hospitals. And China has acquired some experience in improving universal medical insurance, establishing an essential drug system and essential medical and healthcare services and it hopes there can be more exchanges to learn from each other and jointly defeat health problems.

There has to be greater bilateral health emergency and major disease prevention and control coordination and the two countries can cooperate more in health emergency and disease prevention and control approaches, and promote international health resource allocation in more reasonable ways at the World Health Organization and other multinational agencies to deal with global health challenges.

China will increase bilateral traditional and modern medicine integration since traditional Chinese medicine is a complex theoretical system with unique treatments, good results, and extensive use. It has become more popular in other parts of the world and, in 2014, the 67th World Health Assembly adopted a TCM resolution that China proposed, and the International Organization for Standardization issued its first international TCM standards so China wants to share TCM with the Czech people and combine TCM and western medicine.

The great Czech composer Antonín Dvořák expressed his nostalgia with beauty in his Symphony No. 9, which is loved by people worldwide. This masterpiece owes its success to Czech folk music and to African spiritual and American Indian forms. In a similar way, China can transcend history, culture and social differences through health cooperation and appreciate each other’s essence and diversity, by integrating eastern and western wisdom and making full use of each other’s advantages to write a new chapter in sino-Czech health cooperation and contribute to people’s health in both countries.