Ambitious plans for a healthy city in 2030

Shanghai is set to become a much healthier city.

The city’s aim is that by 2030 four out of five days will have good or excellent air quality, following the introduction of Shanghai’s strictest environmental protection system.

Black and smelly waterways are to be eliminated and soil pollution treatment campaign carried out, according to Shanghai Health and Family Planning Commission, which released the draft of the Shanghai Health 2030 plan this month.

The construction of a healthy city will be the key priority, as the city faces a rising number of elderly people and sets about tackling unhealthy lifestyles.

The draft covers many aspects of what a healthy city entails — such as enhancing health education, encouraging people to exercise, control of chronic diseases, perfecting a caring system for the elderly, improving health services for women and children, developing commercial health insurance, enhancing pollution treatment, speeding up food safety supervision and better road safety.

By 2030, it is estimated the city will have 1.2 million residents participating in neighborhood chronic disease management teams, 46 percent of the population doing regular exercises, and 96.5 percent meeting physical health standards.

To help to achieve the plan, local neighborhood health centers will widely promote general physician services this year and have at least 30 percent of residents covered by a GP service, officials said.

The authority said a classified health system, which encourages residents to receive health medical services in their neighborhood for common and chronic diseases will be perfected this year.

“Our target this year is to further public hospital reform, deepen neighborhood health service reform, push healthy city construction, expand public health service, better health service system, promote traditional Chinese medicine renovation and enhance healthy service industry,” said Wu Jinglei, director of Shanghai Health and Family Planning Commission. “Emergency service, blood collecting, organ donation and transplant management and long-term nursing project will also be enhanced.”

The government said it will introduce a charging system to help to control patients’ medical costs. The process of buying medicines will also be introduced to cut drug prices.

By 2030, people should only be paying for a fifth of their total medical costs, according to the plan.