The Policy Texts Related to the Construction of Village Clinics in China from the Perspective of Policy Tools

Background The village clinics an important part of the rural health care service system, and the sustainability of construction and development is directly related to the quality and effectiveness of rural health care services. Objective To conduct quantitative and visual analysis on the policy texts related to the construction of village clinics introduced in China, explore the key points and shortcomings of the policy system for village clinic construction, and provide reference for the formulation and improvement of future relevant policies. Methods Accessed from the official websites of the State Council, the National Health and Wellness Commission, and the Beida Faber database, and searched with the keywords "village clinic" "village health center" "rural healthcare organization" "primary healthcare organization" "rural health" as keywords. The search was set from 2009-01-01 to 2023-03-01. Starting from the construction of an analytical framework in three dimensions: type of policy instrument, macro model of health system, and policy effectiveness, coding analysis was conducted using the quantitative analysis of text content, social network analysis was conducted on the subjects of the issued documents with the help of UCINET 6, and word frequency analysis was conducted on the three periods combining with NVivo. Results A total of 304 policy codes were selected for 56 policy documents, with the policy tool dimension having the highest proportion of supply-side policy tools (50.99%) and relatively low proportion of demand-side policy tools (11.18%), In the macro model dimension of the health system, internal systems account for the most (74.67%) and external systems are less used (25.33%); In terms of policy effectiveness, the policy effectiveness was highest in 2018 (15 points) and lowest in 2012 (3 points). There were fewer joint departmental publications and more individual departmental publications. The policy focuses more on talent construction. Conclusion The internal and external structure of policy tools is imbalanced, emphasizing supply over demand; The top-level policy design for the construction of village clinics is lacking, and there are too few targeted documents; The mechanism for inter departmental collaboration and linkage needs to be further improved.