During July 18^th to July 19^th, the First Complex Adaptive System Training Workshop opened in Beijing. Professor David Peters, David Bishai from school of public health, Johns Hopkins University and Professor FANG Meiqi from People’s University of China were invited as speaker by China National Health Development Research Center (CNHDRC). Professor ZHANG zhenzhong, General-Director of CNHDRC, delivered a speech and Professor MAO Zhengzhong hosted the opening ceremony. There were over 30 researchers participated in the workshop from CNHDRC, China Health Economics Association, Beijing Normal University and Haerbin Medical University.

        Complex Adaptive System (CAS) was first mentioned systematically by Professor John Holland from Santa Fe Institute, United States in 1994. In recent years, it was applied broadly in the fields of ecomonics, financing, information technology and biology. While CAS was explored only in few researchers in the field of health in China. The aim of this training program is to provide facility to apply CAS into the fiels of health development, policy and management.

          Professor FANG Meiqi condidered the system of effective drug delivery at Chinese rural grass-root health facilities (FHS-2 China project) as a complex adaptive system too. It was composed of self-interest orientated, learning capacity and adaptive agents. The agents interacted with each other and environment to exchange information, implementation and gambling. This system formulated top structure. Some of strategies of agents at appropriate layer might play the key role to maintain the status and sustainable development of the system. This CAS model could be exhibited in the computer to show the advantages and disadvantages of all kinds of strategies. The key step was to look for the strategies of agents at appropriate layer.

           Professor David Bishai talked about the social science foundations of complex adaptive systems. He introduced the long historical view of CAS citing from a wide range and different ways including Stone age “Homo sapiens”, Plato’s Republic, Materialist versions of history of Marx/Engels, system dynamics and agent based modeling at last. He also mentioned about the general approach to modeling: define desired outcome of system, define a metric, develop alternative solutions, iterative tinkering against the metric.

          Professor David Peters shared his view on the definition and understanding of health system, system V.S. non-system as well as common elements in health system including actors, functions, outcomes and oversight. Also he talked about the relationship between CAS and health system, and the way CAS informed health system reforms. At last he separated the trainees into 8 teams with 4 members each, organized them to play a game of Friday Night at the ER to mimic the hospital management.
         In the training courses, students and professors had a good interaction. The students learned very seriously and discussed actively with a high degree of learning enthusiasm. Professor reacted the questions about the CAS theory, health service system and other issues with a wonderful answer. After the closure of first day training, all the participants generally reflected to not only enrich the knowledge but also to improve the theoretical level, especially in-depth understanding of CAS.