Cost estimation of basic community public health service in China

Objective To estimate the cost of basic community public health service in China and to provide references for making investment policy and work instruction.Methods A literature search was conducted on Chinese electronic database(including Wanfang Database,China Doctoral Dissertations Full-Text Database and China Master's Theses Full-Text Database)from the beginning of 2001 to July 2013.The included papers and the references were comparatively analyzed using SPSS 15.0.Results There were 693 papers identified,of which,41 were included in the study and 12 disclosed detailed research results.For the 41 papers,22(53.7%)adopted full costing method and 11(26.8%)used activity-based costing(ABC) method,and Six-Item Screener(SIS)was used for traditional classification method by 21 papers(51.2%).The results of cost estimation showed that the cost of basic community public health service per capita was significantly different among the studies(17.3 RMB yuan to 67.5 RMB yuan).The manpower cost was the main cost of basic community public health service(between 48.4% and 80.15%).Significant difference existed in the service cost in different regions(15 200 RMB yuan to 72 700 RMB yuan).Conclusion Further exploration and research on the cost estimation of basic community public health service in China are warranted.