ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Public Health
Sec. Public Health Policy
This article is part of the Research TopicPublic Health Outcomes: The Role of Social Security Systems in Improving Residents' Health WelfareView all 104 articles
A Quantitative Study of China's Rehabilitation Policies from the Perspective of Policy Tools
Provisionally accepted
Xinyang Jiang
Li Luo*- Fudan University, Shanghai, China
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Purpose: Rehabilitation policies constitute a critical guiding framework for national and regional development. This study aims to use policy tools to analyze the specific content and structural characteristics of China's rehabilitation-related policies from 2010 to 2023, and provide a new reference perspective for international rehabilitation policy research. Materials and methods: A three-dimensional analytical framework of "policy tool type–policy theme characteristic– stakeholder" was developed. Data were drawn from nation-level policies on rehabilitation medical services issued by the State Council of the People's Republic of China and the National Health Commission. Based on established inclusion and exclusion criteria, 41 valid policy documents were selected. NVivo (release 14.23.1) was used for four-level coding, and reliability and validity tests were conducted. Policy texts were first quantified, followed by descriptive analysis. Results: A total of 298 codes were identified. Among policy tool types, environmental tools accounted for the highest proportion (58.05%), followed by supply-side tools (32.98%), while demand-side tools had the lowest proportion (9.06%). From the stakeholder perspective, provider organizations (42.95%) were the core target, followed by regulatory authorities (19.13%) and rehabilitation service recipients (19.80%). Clinical practitioners and the rehabilitation capital market each accounted for 9.06%, with most of the policies related to passive response-type policies. Conclusion: China's current rehabilitation medical service policies have insufficient use of supply-side and demand-side tools, and uneven policy coverage among stakeholders. The structural application of policy tools should be optimized, particularly by strengthening the role of demand-side policy tools.
Keywords: Rehabilitation, China, policy tool, Policy Analysis, Rehabilitation policy
Received: 31 Jul 2025; Accepted: 17 Nov 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Jiang and Luo. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Li Luo, liluofudan@163.com
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