Objective  To examine health emergency management capabilities of health administrative sectors in China and to identify deficiencies in emergency management capabilities for providing evidences to reasonable allocation of health resources and the construction of health emergency management capability in the administrative sectors.

  Methods  The data of the study were from a national survey on health emergency management capacity, which was sponsored by National Health and Family Planning Commission and conducted among 31 provincial, 342 municipal, and 2 995 county level health administrative agencies in 2014; the survey adopted an index system consisting of 8 primary indices (system structure, emergency response team, equipment and reserve, training and drill, propaganda/education and scientific research, surveillance and early warning, emergency response, rehabilitating evaluation), 34 secondary indices, and 81 tertiary indices; the maximum score for the evaluation on the capability of an administrative sector was 900 and the maximum score was converted to centesimal scale in data analysis.

  Results  Valid information were collected from in 30 provincial, 307 municipal, and 2 584 county level administrative sectors in the survey and the average scores for health emergency management capability of the administrative sectors at the three levels were 82.7, 77.9 and 75.8, respectively. For the health administrative sectors in the eastern, central and western region of China, the capability scores were 83.7, 79.6 and 83.9 for the provincial sectors; the scores were 83.3, 76.7 and 74.8 for the municipal sectors; and the scores were 78.7, 75.0 and 73.8 for the county sectors, respectively.

  Conclusion  There were administrative level and regional differences in health emergency management capabilities of health administrative sectors and the capabilities of grassroots administrative sectors need to be improved. The health emergency management capability-related rehabilitating evaluation training and drill, propaganda/education and scientific research should be promoted for health administrative sectors at different levels.