Policies of voluntary services involved in public health emergencies in China: Evolution, evaluation, and expectation

BACKGROUND: Public health emergencies have an immense effect on social stability, economic development, and human life. Volunteers played an indispensable role in health monitoring, assistance with daily life, and social network repairing. However, few policies analysis concentrated on the voluntary services involved in public health emergencies. OBJECTIVES: This study aims to analyze and summarize the advantages and flaws of the policy documents relating to voluntary services involved in public health emergencies, and put forward the enlightenment on policymaking and optimization. METHODS: A three-dimensional analysis framework of “Policy instruments—Participants of voluntary services—Stages of voluntary services” was designed. Policy documents at the national level were retrieved from the official websites of the State Council of the People's Republic of China and its departments as well as the PKULAW Database. NVivo software was applied to analyze the contents of the included policy documents. Gephi software was adopted to conduct a visualized atlas analysis of the cooperative network among policymaking departments. RESULTS: A total of 77 policy documents were included, and most were published in 2020 (n = 40). The Ministry of Civil Affairs (n = 19) and the National Health Commission (n = 18) issued more documents than the other departments. They cooperated more extensively with other departments. In policy documents, supply-side policy instruments were utilized the most (65.4%), followed by demand-side (23.9%). Voluntary organizations in the form of ambiguous sense were most mentioned as service participants (n = 73). In the stages of service delivery, service content mainly involved the prevention and control of public health emergencies (27, 18.9%) and psychological counseling (26, 18.2%). CONCLUSION: Time distribution of policy documents featured “incubation period—outbreak and continuous evolution period—elimination recovery period.” Joint issuing became the dominant form. The internal structure of policy instruments was unbalanced with different priorities, and the overall structure is expected to be optimized to promote voluntary organization management, reinforce external resources, and close the gap between policymaking and policy implementation. Volunteers' competence and voluntary organizations' system needs to be improved, and the contents of voluntary services should be enriched for the preparedness for future public health emergency.