The new school will focus on infectious diseases and aims to strengthen public health policy in China. Shawn Yuan reports.
As the world continues to battle the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, Tsinghua University, one of China's most academically acclaimed higher education institutions, launched its School of Public Health on April 2. The school is aiming to train the next generation of professionals who will take on the responsibility of safeguarding the public health of the world's most populous country.
Margaret Chan, the former Director-General of WHO, will take up the post of the founding dean. And more than 70 faculty members drawn from across the university's educational departments will serve as the backbone of the faculty.
Expanding from the existing Research Center for Public Health, which was established in 2010 and has been offering International Master of Public Health degrees for 6 years, Tsinghua's newly founded School of Public Health is expected to award MPH and PhD degrees, with the first batch of students expected to be admitted in 2021.
Vanke, one of the leading real estate companies in China, donated all of its 200 million shares of stock, which are estimated at more than £600 million, to Tsinghua for the development of the school.
The launch of the school came at a particularly challenging time when China's existing public health emergency response system is under heavy fire for its initial reporting and containment of the COVID-19 pandemic that has now spread across the globe and is posing an almost unprecedented public health challenge to the world.
Stationed at one of China's most respected higher education institutions, Tsinghua's School of Public Health is hoping to improve the public health system in China.
“The current epidemic has revealed some of the obvious shortcomings in our nation's epidemic emergency response and public health management system”, Qiu Yong, president of Tsinghua University, said during the opening ceremony of the school. “It also reflects the importance and urgency of global collaboration in public health.”
Compared with other schools of public health in China, which were originally developed in association with schools of medicine, Tsinghua's is expected to operate with other departments, including humanity and social sciences, science, engineering, and management, to create a multidisciplinary curriculum. With a focus on infectious diseases, Tsinghua's School of Public Health will collaborate with departments such as the Department of Earth System Science, which has strong monitoring and modelling capabilities on environment-related diseases—the foundation of big data-based infectious disease modelling and prevention.
Local governments in China have few public health experts to guide their policy-making process, so Tsinghua will include special training to different levels of governors as part of its plan to become a leading power in training public health professionals to address the pressing issues in China's disease control.
“As shown from this pandemic, our [local governors] have limited training on handling health emergencies”, said Peng Gong, a professor at Tsinghua University helping to launch the school.
One of the programme missions, as suggested by an internal document shared with The Lancet, is to “play a constructive role in the response towards national public health emergency and prevention of infectious diseases”.
To achieve such a goal, the Tsinghua management aims to establish a more robust system to ensure the School of Public Health's ability to sound early alarms should new infectious disease threats emerge.
During an academic advisory committee panel, experts from Tsinghua have voiced concern on whether Tsinghua could quickly alert the public in the face of a public health emergency. The question of whether such information could be released free from government censorship was also raised.
“We are actively engaging in a dialogue with the government to allow us to build an omniscient surveillance system and systematic modelling capacity”, said Gong, “so that it could gradually achieve the predictive and early warning powers to serve the nation and the world.”
Gong believes due to the special status Tsinghua enjoys in China's educational and political system, the university is better positioned to have direct dialogues with government representatives than many other institutions.
He also told The Lancet that the joining of Margaret Chan is likely to bring a stronger international network and provide a more open and freer environment for academics.