ArticleFrontiers in public health2026
Spatiotemporal coupling coordination between population aging and healthcare resource capacity in China: a provincial-level analysis, 2000-2023.
Article in Frontiers in public health, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
0 citing papers in PubMed.
No citing paper in PubMed yet.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Introduction: China is experiencing rapid population aging with marked regional disparities, posing sustained challenges for healthcare provision. This study examines the spatiotemporal coupling coordination of two provincial composite indices, one summarizing population aging characteristics and one summarizing healthcare resource capacity, across 31 provincial-level regions, 2000-2023 (713 valid province-year observations). Methods: Aging was measured by five demographic and health indicators, capacity by six supply-side indicators covering hospitals and primary healthcare institutions; principal component analysis and the entropy method were applied in parallel and cross-validated (Pearson Results: China's aging coefficient rose from 7.0% (2000) to 14.9% (2023), following an acceleration-stabilization pattern with marked spatial heterogeneity. Hospital beds reached 9.10 million (≈6.4 per 1,000 population) and licensed physicians 4.28 million by 2023, up 77.6% since 2010, while the normalized healthcare composite rose from 0.02 to 0.91. National coordination improved across the period, moving from the lower to the upper bound of the pooled min-max normalization; these bounds denote the sample minimum and maximum rather than absent or perfect coordination. Regional disparities nevertheless persisted: Shandong and Jiangsu recorded values in the highest class of the classification adopted here (D ≥ 0.60), whereas Tibet and Qinghai remained in the lowest (D < 0.20), and the coefficient of variation of provincial aging coefficients declined only from 0.41 to 0.38. Discussion: The study contributes a 24-year, all-province series built on one fixed indicator framework spanning the reforms of 2003, 2009 and 2016, and a rule-based provincial typology, summarized as a Four-Dimensional Collaborative Development Framework, that identifies where demographic structure and healthcare capacity correspond least closely. The findings are an input to regional healthcare planning; whether the measures they suggest improve the care older adults receive lies beyond this design.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.