Quantitative evaluation of provincial government plans for public health emergencies in China

Abstract

In order to rationalize public health emergency plans (PHEPs) and compensate for the shortcomings of current public health emergency (PHE) management, we conducted a quantitative study on evaluating and analyzing provincial PHEPs in China from the perspective of the consistency and completeness of plan texts. Based on the policy modeling consistency index (PMC-Index) model, we developed an evaluation variable system for PHEPs, which consists of 9 main variables and 57 sub-variables. We used stratified sampling to randomly select five provincial PHEPs in China as samples for empirical analysis. Each plan was evaluated and improved according to its PMC-Index value and PMC-Surface diagram. The results showed that the overall design of the PHEPs was generally reasonable, despite much room for improvement. The PMC-Index values of the five plans were 7.06, 6.23, 5.66, 6.34 and 3.70, respectively, with an average value of 5.80. Among the five plans, three were rated as good, one was rated as acceptable, and one was rated as unacceptable. According to the average values of the main variables, we found weaknesses in the plans in monitoring, early warning, evaluating and reporting, early disposal, emergency support, recovery, working mechanism and plan reliability and proposed optimization methods to improve the weaknesses. This study contributes to evaluating PHEPs and identifying their shortcomings, which provides not only a beneficial experience to plan-makers but also a supplement for the field of plan evaluation.