BEIJING — China will quicken the pace to build a cultivation system for high-caliber public health specialists, among its wider efforts to shore up points of weakness exposed by the COVID-19 epidemic.

A guideline on accelerating the innovative development of China's medical education, recently issued by the State Council, foresees that a number of high-level public health schools will be built in the country's topnotch universities.

It also calls for improving the practical ability of Chinese undergraduate students majoring in preventive medicine and enhancing medical teaching and research cooperation among medical institutions, centers for disease prevention and control and infectious disease hospitals.

The guideline, which urges greater importance to be attached to public health than before in China's medical education, comes as paying more attention to treatment than prevention has increasingly become a structural problem in the current education system, said Qi Xuejin, vice-president of the Chinese Medical Doctor Association.

Qi called for innovative development of China's medical education in a holistic, systematic and coordinated way, so as to meet the new challenges posed by the epidemic and the new tasks of implementing the Healthy China strategy.

Experts suggest China should put in place a standard public health education system that is comprised of academic education, post-graduation education and continuing education.