The next decade is likely to produce any number of global challenges that will affect health and health care, including pan-national infections such as the new coronavirus COVID-19 and others that will be related to global warming. Nurses will be required to react to these events, even though they will also be affected as ordinary citizens. The future resilience of healthcare services will depend on having sufficient numbers of nurses who are adequately resourced to face the coming challenges.
China has seen the largest human migration in history, and the country's rapid urbanisation has important consequences for public health. A provincial analysis of its urbanisation trends shows shifting and accelerating rural-to-urban migration across the country and accompanying rapid increases in city size and population. The growing disease burden in urban areas attributable to nutrition and lifestyle choices is a major public health challenge, as are troubling disparities in health-care access, vaccination coverage, and accidents and injuries in China's rural-to-urban migrant population. Urban environmental quality, including air and water pollution, contributes to disease both in urban and in rural areas, and traffic-related accidents pose a major public health threat as the country becomes increasingly motorised. To address the health challenges and maximise the benefits that accompany this rapid urbanisation, innovative health policies focused on the needs of migrants and research that could close knowledge gaps on urban population exposures are needed.
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