Trends and suggestions on the development of China's public-health discipline under the new situation

The public-health system is an important part of national security, and public-health discipline is the basis of the national public-health system. Strengthening the construction of public-health discipline is the key to cultivating high-quality public-health talent teams, improve the public health-service level, and the ability to deal with public-health emergencies in the region to strengthen national security governance. In recent years, public-health discipline in China has transformed, such as discipline setting from specialisation to integration, talent training from academic-oriented to applied-oriented, professional accreditation from free access to standardisation, and scientific research evaluation from paper based to comprehensive evaluation. The new situation brought about by the novel coronavirus pneumonia epidemic prevention and control put forward new requirements for public-health discipline in China. This paper outlines the enlightenment of public-health discipline construction in developed countries, referring to the experience of the United States, Europe, and other Asian countries in public-health discipline construction and explores China's model of public-health discipline development combined with China's practice. Suggestions ranging from more flexibility and autonomy to the discipline setting in Colleges and universities are made to promote the deep cross-integration of multi-disciplines and medical discipline. Improvement in applied talents' training level and scale in public health to strengthen professional education and elite education, as well as providing strong talent support for the national public health-service system, is recommended. Discipline-evaluation standards should be established and improved by building standards for talent-training qualification access, public-health education certification, discipline certification, and evaluation to lay a good foundation for the effectiveness of public-health practice in China. By reshaping the discipline-development values, optimising the scientific-research organisation system and mechanism, reforming the scientific-research evaluation index system, and reforming the scientific research-evaluation system, the discipline-construction direction can be guided to realise the purpose of discipline development serving the society.