UNFPA × PICA Health — Case Study

The Challenge

Women's health in China carries a marked urban–rural divide. In 2020, maternal mortality in rural areas stood at 18.5 per 100,000 — against 14.1 in cities — and 43.1% of rural women had gone three years without a health check-up, versus 28.3% of urban women. Gynaecological health literacy scores followed the same pattern.

The physicians best placed to close that gap — the village and township doctors national policy calls "health guardians at rural residents' side" — want to help: 97% of grassroots general practitioners say they need stronger clinical capabilities. But 77.2% report they are not sufficiently familiar with clinical guidelines for common conditions, and women's health across the life course has never been systematically covered in their training. To bring life-course health awareness to grassroots women, the physicians had to be empowered first.

What We Did

The China Grassroots Women's Life-Course Care Programme — an ongoing life-course women's health education programme with UNFPA — builds a sustainable, structured education system for grassroots physicians, then reaches the public through them.

• Curriculum: Five modules spanning a woman's whole life course — adolescent health, contraception & fertility protection, peri-pregnancy care, menopause management, and gynaecological self-care & disease prevention. The first module in delivery, contraception & fertility protection, breaks into eight course tracks — from modern contraceptive methods and method selection for different populations to fertility-preservation concepts and patient-education technique.

• Review: Programme architecture and every piece of medical content are reviewed by an academician-level authority in obstetrics and gynaecology, on top of our standard academic review.

• Physician learning: 32 "Five-Minute Medical School" micro-video courses — four per course track, each under five minutes — so physicians build structured knowledge in the gaps of a working day.

• Two-hop delivery to the public: Each physician course pairs with two one-minute Q&A-format patient-education videos — 64 in total. Physicians forward them to resident WeChat groups and individual patients in one tap, turning every trained physician into a trusted local channel for women's health literacy.

• Incentives: Every share and completed learning task earns platform points redeemable for SMS credits and medical courses — keeping physicians actively spreading content, not just consuming it.

• Evidence loop: A baseline survey across a 50,000-physician pool (2,000 sampled) maps attitudes, knowledge gaps and format preferences; the platform back end then tracks course plays, physician forwards and patient opens — so coverage is measured at every hop, not assumed.

Results

• The programme is underway, with backend analytics tracking both hops of delivery — physician learning and patient reach.

• Programme targets: 30,000+ physicians trained nationwide (at least 40% in designated priority regions), 150,000+ course plays, 5,000+ physicians actively forwarding patient-education content, and 20,000+ patient opens.

• Next stages extend the same delivery model across the remaining life-course modules — from adolescent health to menopause management.