Healing the schism between public health and medicine, promoting the integration of prevention and treatment

It has been nearly 30 years since the publication of Healing the Schism: Epidemiology, Medicine, and the Public's Health by Professor Kerr L. White. Although scholars have been calling for strengthening the integration of public health and clinical medicine in Chinese medical education and eliminating barriers between public health professionals and clinicians, these effects are not obvious. The epidemic situation of COVID-19 has become an open course for Chinese citizens on the treatment, prevention and control of infectious diseases. Consequently, the public has higher expectations on the modernization of public health governance, and the social atmosphere of bridging the gap between public health and clinical medical education has been establishing. In the future, when combating with novel infectious diseases and public health emergencies, the response capacity of public health system and treatment capacity of clinical system in China will be significantly improved, and the situation of insufficient integration of medical treatment and prevention is bound to be reversed.