Improvement of public health and preventive medicine education in China from the perspective of “center-edge” theory

“Center edge” is a classical theory used to explain education and national development in comparative higher education research. The study analyzes the objective trend and the role of public health and preventive medicine education from the theory through multidimensional interpretation of policy requirements, epidemic demand, education supply and foreign experience, points out that public health education should become the communication center from university to society and disseminate public health education among the public actively. But there are practical bottlenecks in the development of public health and preventive medicine education in China, such as insufficient professional identity from the vague target positioning, existing gap between education and new medicine standard, and the weakness of public health knowledge and skills in the training of clinical medical talents. It is necessary to reform the mode of public health and general medicine talent training comprehensively and gradually, especially to promote the enrollment of large categories, separate track training and layered training. At the same time, we should pool the joint efforts of schools, governments, relevant institutions and society to establish a full chain development mechanism for public health talents under the system integrating the concept of “starting-process-result”.