Education and health prioritized

Qingdao is striving to deepen reforms in residents' livelihoods by accelerating construction of a double mechanism that combines high-quality resources with basic education and medical health, while also meeting demands for participation in culture and sports.

The city has continuously expanded the quantity and quality of its educational resources by deepening the supply-side structural reform of basic education.

There are currently 165 educational groups in the city, and over the past two years, 94 newly built schools have achieved high starting-point education while 53 others have grown rapidly as pilot schools for quality improvement as the city promotes the integration of compulsory education in urban and rural areas to build a unified education funding guarantee mechanism.

Adhering to a people-centered and life-oriented approach, Qingdao's health and medical work focuses on improving medical service capabilities and provides comprehensive and lifelong healthcare for residents. As of the end of 2022, there were 8,763 medical and health institutions at all levels in the city, with 67,984 beds and a total of 118,110 health personnel. The annual outpatient service volume was 86.51 million appointments, and inpatient service volume was 1.58 million appointments.

Qingdao has strengthened construction of major disease prevention and control centers and specialist alliances by forming closely integrated urban medical consortia and constructing an integrated medical and health service system within the region. It has established 16 county-level medical consortia, 30 specialist alliances, eight telemedicine collaboration networks, 15 county-level medical secondary centers and 28 community hospitals. A digital empowerment mechanism in Qingdao connects 3,508 medical and health institutions, achieving "one network connection" for medical and health data.

The city also takes "meeting the diversified needs of the public" as the starting point and foothold for bolstering high-quality development of cultural undertakings. It is home to 11 public libraries and 11 cultural centers, all of which are national first-class institutions. Qingdao has built 208 branch libraries, 34 24-hour libraries, 70 reading pavilions, 159 branch cultural centers and more than 1,900 cultural service centers. It also has 125 types of museums, ranking first in Shandong in terms of total quantity, with major clusters in maritime culture, historical architecture, rural memory and industrial heritage. A total of 107 museums have implemented free admission.

Since 2022, the Qingdao bureau of culture and tourism has created 33 art performance projects based on its ancient buildings and launched a series of cultural activities such as live-action dramas and traditional arts, enabling residents and tourists to experience diverse cultural charm.

Additionally, the city has increased the number of fitness facilities to more than 11,000 and increased its per capita sports venue area to 3.3 square meters, achieving basic full coverage of the urban community's eight-minute fitness circle.

A medical worker measures the blood pressure of an elderly woman in Qingdao's Licang district. ZHANG YING/FOR CHINA DAILY