Several days ago, an exchange meeting was held in Jiujiang City, Jiangxi Province, by the National Development and Reform Commission on implementing national basic public service standards. At the meeting, a relevant official of Haiyan made experience exchanges entitled “Haiyan’s Efforts to Promote Urban and Rural Integrated and Balanced Development by Equalizing Basic Public Services” and introduced the highlights of work.

In recent years, the county has adhered to urban and rural integrated and balanced development, taken Haiyan being a national pilot city of public service standardization as an opportunity to implement the “National Standards for Basic Public Services” and striven to promote the balance of urban and rural basic public services by issuing the lists of county-level standards, establishing standard systems and training mechanisms, and improving the supervision and inspection mechanism for standards’ implementation, and has achieved good progress in building Haiyan into a model of common prosperity.

In 2022, the per capita disposable income of Haiyan’s urban and rural residents totaled 74,280 yuan and 47,155 yuan respectively, and the income ratio between urban and rural residents was narrowed to 1.58:1, which continued to take the lead in urban and rural balanced development. Haiyan was identified as a provincial-level pilot county in public service equalization reform, a national-level model county in new-type urbanization, a national primary-level comprehensive pilot health zone, and the first county with high-quality and balanced development in compulsory education in China. In 2020, Haiyan was identified as one of the first national pilot cities in basic public service standardization and passed the examination with high scores.

In terms of equalization of quality education, Haiyan took the lead in equalizing the standards of schools’ construction, teaching staff’s distribution, public funds per student, and basic equipment allocation to ensure teaching resources’ equalization between schools and between urban and rural areas.

The comprehensive difference coefficients among schools of the county are kept below 0.27, far better than the national standard. The county takes the lead in making standardized schools of compulsory education available to all students and has constructed a platform for teachers’ smooth flow among schools and between urban and rural areas to share education resources, and implemented the system that each school’s teachers are recruited by the school itself. In 2022, the teachers flowing among different schools accounted for 43% of the eligible teachers of the whole county, and 38.7% of the principals of rural schools were famous teachers above the county level; the county implemented education community(group)-based reform, encouraged urban areas and leading schools to help rural areas and weak schools in teaching, set up four education communities for integrated development and nine education communities for joint construction, which covered all compulsory education schools of the county; the county promoted all urban and rural schools to “synchronize” meetings, class teaching, teaching research and activities to achieve high-quality coordinated development of the schools of “education communities”; the county improved the schooling policy for migrant workers’ children, and more than 97% of their children received education in public schools; the county was rated as one of the national-level counties that had basically realized educational modernization, one of the provincial-level pilot reform counties in constructing compulsory education communities (groups), and the first national county in high-quality and balanced development of compulsory education.

In terms of the integration of medical resources, Haiyan has taken the lead in reforming the financial compensation mechanism of primary-level medical institutions, for which more financial funds have been provided on the basis of reforming the expenditure on basic construction, equipment purchase and medical personnel. More favorable medical insurance reimbursement policies have been provided for primary-level medical institutions, and the reimbursement rates for outpatient and inpatient services in the primary-level medical institutions have been raised by 30% and 10% respectively, and the minimum payment for hospitalization has been lowered to 300 yuan.

The county has established disciplines’ co-construction mechanism and coordinated development mechanism. Over 50 medical experts have provided long-term services at the primary-level medical institutions. The county has bought medical equipment such as CT for the hospitals of towns (sub-districts), established resources sharing centers such as clinical testing centers and medical imaging centers to make scarce auxiliary diagnostic resources be shared at primary-level medical institutions.

The county has trained 265 village doctors of college graduates. Now in Haiyan there are 5.91general practitioners per 10,000 people. The county has established urban and rural traditional Chinese medicine service systems and province-county-town-village traditional Chinese medicine service channels, so that primary-level medical institutions can provide 43% of traditional Chinese medicine services of the whole county.

The county has reformed the tiered diagnosis and treatment system of hypertension and diabetes, implemented the special action on elderly health services, set up integrated clinics for chronic diseases in each town and sub-district, developed the application “Digital and Intelligent Chinese TCM”, created a management model featured by integrated services, intelligent applications and wide use of TCM resources in the primary-level medical institutions, and established digital “central pharmacies for sharing” to settle the problems of using traditional Chinese medicines in towns and villages. Although the subsidies to traditional Chinese medicines prepared in ready-to-use forms decreased by 15%, the TCM outpatient rate increased by 150%. The county has established a health information platform to realize urban and rural connectivity of public health and medical data with electronic health records as the core, and medical experts’ remote consultations can be directly available to villages (communities). 90.02% and 68.18% patients choose to receive medical services respectively in the county and in the primary-level medical institutions. In 2022, primary-level main health development indicators in constructing national primary-level pilot comprehensive health zones ranked first in the country.

In terms of cultural services, village-level cultural special managers and cultural delegates have been arranged to each village. By 2022, the county established 697 village-level art teams, which held more than 2,000 art performances, constructed at least a cultural auditorium in each village, explored new ways for social forces to participate in the construction, management, application and education of cultural rural auditoriums, established a new government-dominated culture auditorium cooperation model in which social forces and markets gave full play to their roles. Now 121 “10-minute quality cultural life circles” have been available to all villagers and community residents. In 2021 the public cultural facilities per 10,000 people in Haiyan ranked fourth in Zhejiang, and the county was built into one of the public cultural service system demonstration zones in Zhejiang with the highest scores.