Policy implementation challenges and the ritualization of public health emergency plans: An investigation of urban communities in Jiangsu Province, China.

ABSTRACT:

Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic has been a global public health emergency, and countries worldwide have responded to it through a vast array of pre-planned, adaptively devised and ad-hoc measures. In China, public health emergency plans - the plans expected to drive the response to epidemics or pandemics - demonstrated a concerning tendency towards "ritualization." "Ritualization" denotes the practice of public health emergency plans to be reliably developed so that a formal requirement is met, while being implemented selectively or not at all in the emergency response.

Methods

This study explored the phenomenon of ritualization by analyzing data from 1485 questionnaires, 60 in-depth interviews and 85 actual public health emergency plans. It used the Smith Policy-I

SUBMITTER: Zhang R 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9868851 | biostudies-literature | 2022

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature