Objective   To analyze the emphasis and insufficiency of policies for the construction of public health emergency management system (PHEMS) in China and to provide references for the optimization of the policies.

  Methods  By searching official websites of relevant departments and affiliated institutions of the State Council, we retrieved policy documents on the PHEMS construction issued from 2004 through 2020. Based on the policy tool theory, we conducted a content analysis on the 7 documents included in the study using a two-dimension (basic policy tool and emergency management) analytical framework.

  Results  From the texts of the 7 documents, totally 234 policy tool-related item elements were coded. Of the 234 item elements, 141 (60.26%), 84 (35.90%), and 9 (3.85%) corresponded to environment-, supply-, and demand-oriented policy tools in terms of basic policy tool dimension. As for the dimension of emergency management, 155 (66.24%), 70 (29.91%), and 9 (3.85%) involved in-process, advance management, and post-event management, respectively. Among the item elements categorized as environment- and demand-oriented policy tools, 46.10% and 22.22% were involved in advance management and were significantly higher than that (3.57%) among the item elements categorized as supply-oriented policy tools (both P < 0.05).

  Conclusion   In documents on basic policy tools for PHEMS construction in China, the majority are the item elements about environment-oriented policy tools, followed by those about supply-oriented tools, but the elements about demand-oriented tools are insufficient in number; from the perspective of emergency management, the number of item elements about in-process are in the largest proportion, while the proportion of elements about advance and post-event management are in lower proportion. The results suggest that the development of PHEMS construction related policies needs to be improved in China.