How is China’s Health Development During 2012 to 2017? A Longitudinal Study Based on Comprehensive Evaluation and Linear Growth Model

Abstract Background: Since 2012, China has come into a new period of health development. This paper comprehensively described China’s health development and explored associated influencing factors during the last 6 years (2012-2017).Methods: Data for this study came from statistics yearbook and analysis unit were provincial regions. Comprehensive evaluation (principal component analysis and entropy weight method) was employed to calculate the comprehensive health index to evaluate the health. Then linear growth model was applied to explore factors that influenced the development.Results: Results showed that, since 2012, China’s health had a sustainable growth but inequities among provincial regions were still existing and becoming larger. For influencing factors, time was always a significant positive predictor ( ) and it was affected by geographical distributions ( ) and distance to Beijing ( ), which indicated that regions in central or far from Beijing had a lower growth. Among socioeconomics variables, urbanization level was the final factor ( ) that promoted China’s health development and caused development inequalities. Besides, health level was also influenced by the distance to Beijing ( ), regions near to Beijing had a higher health level.Conclusion: Time effect was the results of policy, during 2012 to 2017, China’s sustainable health development was brought by the policy effect and growth of urbanization level.Thus, it is crucial for one country to introduce suitable health policies and narrow the urban-rural gaps to improve its health. Distance to Beijing represented the potential political influence on health of one country’s capital due to the policy execution level which means that supervisions need to be strengthened for regions far from the capital. Besides, supports and supervisions also need to be enhanced in central regions. They were one of the reasons that caused development inequalities.