Evaluation at the Time of Health Systems Reform: Chinese Policymakers’ Need for a Robust System of Evaluations to Assess Progress in the Implementation of Reform Efforts

In 2014 the authors of this paper, evaluators from China and Canada, jointly interviewed 12 policymakers in China at the national and provincial levels. This paper describes the needs of policymakers and how they view the evaluation capacity‐building needs of the health system. The learnings from the policymaker dialogues informed the evaluation capacity‐building efforts at three pilot sites in China. This paper focuses on the evaluation capacities needed by policymakers and implementers specifically to address inequities in the health sector, unlike most publications that focus on evaluation capacities of researchers.