The 2024 World Conference on Traditional Medicine adopted a declaration on Wednesday urging joint efforts to harness the potential of traditional medicine in achieving universal health coverage.

The conference, held in Beijing on Tuesday and Wednesday, gathered over 3,000 participants from 85 countries and regions, including more than 600 representatives from overseas.

The declaration recognizes that traditional medicine is an important carrier of excellent traditional culture and can cover all levels of healthcare across the entire course of life.

Research into traditional medicine requires specialized methods due to its cross-cultural nature and formulation of related policies should be based on both scientific and traditional evidence, it says.

The declaration calls for scaling up efforts in mobilizing more financial and technical resources for traditional medicine to enhance its evidence base and encourages use of novel and innovative research methods or tools.

It urges political commitments and policy frameworks for safe and effective integration of traditional medicine into health systems and calls for sharing of integration models for achieving universal health coverage.

It is also important to strengthen international exchanges and collaboration and roll out more bilateral or multilateral international programs to spur industry development as well as build capacities in most-needed countries.

During the closing ceremony of the conference, the National Administration of Traditional Chinese Medicine also released an international research cooperation initiative, as well as a program dedicated to promoting communication and capability building of traditional medicine talents.

The talent nurturing program is aimed at cultivating over 1,300 foreigners who work in the traditional medicine industry or who practice western medicine but are aspiring to learn TCM in the next three years.