Objective To understand the current application status and internal and external characteristics of national health management-related policies in China, and to provide references for improving the national health management policy system.

Methods A content analysis method was adopted, and a two-dimensional framework of "core areas of national health management–policy tools" was constructed to quantitatively analyze the included documents.

Results A total of 102 national-level policy documents related to national health management were included. Among the 503 policy text codes, environment-oriented policy tools accounted for the highest proportion (61.63%), followed by supply-oriented (26.84%) and demand-oriented (11.53%) tools. The existing policies' attention to health fields, ranked from high to low, were health services and security (43.34%), healthy living (33.20%), healthy environment (19.48%), health industry (2.19%), and health level (1.79%).

Conclusions The use of environment-oriented policy tools in national health management-related policies can be moderately reduced, while strengthening the formulation of demand-oriented policies, optimizing the internal structure of policy tools, and ensuring balanced coverage of different health fields.