1. Introduction
The community is the basic unit of society. In the sense of human resources science, the community is formed by a group of connected people living and working in a specific area [
1]. Usually, communities are not administratively divided, but in China, they are included in the administrative system and managed by the government. The community staff in China are generally made up of civic workers made up of management, service workers, and security officers [
2]. In recent years, some cities in China have set about exploring the PPP (Public-Private Partnership) model. During the coronavirus epidemic, the government and the market have shown their increased willingness to cooperate. Yan Oi Tong, a social welfare institution in Hong Kong, is partially sponsored by the Social Welfare Department and along with commercial fees, these funds are used to provide community services. The institution recruits and trains employees in their own mold. Some developed countries also use similar management. Communities in Germany are generally managed by property companies and most of the infrastructure, such as the kindergartens and the hospitals, are privately managed.
Nowadays in China, the communities adopt a grid management model. The model divides the residential area into smaller service units in terms of the buildings and business companies, which lays a solid foundation for the intellectualization of community governance. However, the current division mode overfocuses on the physical environment and neglects the internal and external contacts of the community, along with accurate targets based on the needs of community residents [
3]. Therefore, the communities fail to provide services according to the demands of the residents and are unable to play a constructive role in grid management [
4,
5].
The community was a key and special part during the epidemic in Wuhan. It took on the responsibility to improve the public health environment and to help with the registration, transportation, and treatment of the patients in the community. In addition, it also provided the basic necessities of life for the residents during the middle and later stages of the epidemic. The community not only acted as the main organization of the public health emergency system but also committed to urban governance (see
Figure 1). The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) epidemic is a whole new challenge for humanity. Medical service in cities, especially in metropolises, is under great pressure. At the beginning of the epidemic, communities were trapped by such problems as resource shortages, a lack of service, and a poor information platform, which had caused difficulties in the control of the spread of the epidemic. The headquarters took a series of measures in time to supply service personnel, optimize the service model, and provide a variety of community services. Thanks to these timely measures, the new confirmed cases per day began to decrease and the risk of the disease spreading kept declining by setting up a multi-sectoral cooperation platform, swiftly scaling up epidemic emergency capacity, whole-of-society actions with engagement of social organizations, and engaging citizens in the epidemic prevention and control. To optimize the supply of community service resources and to promote the community service capacity in regular epidemic prevention and control, it is necessary to analyze the supply and demand gap of community services during an epidemic. Since community services are quite complex because of the diversity of the personnel composition and the multiple levels of the service demand, it is time to introduce a more efficient analysis model, which is named the data envelopment analysis (DEA) model. The DEA model is one of the most commonly used efficiency evaluation methods for a DMU (decision-making unit) to study multiple inputs and outputs [
6]. This method has been widely used in the evaluation of commercial service performance and the allocation of public service personnel due to its advantages [
7]. It specializes in calculating the relative efficiencies of multi-input and multi-output DMUs without the distraction of dimensional unification. As the basic model in DEA, CCR (A. Charnes & W. W. Cooper & E. Rhodes) can not only measure the efficiency of its evaluation object but also evaluate its technical and integrated efficiency, while obtaining the slack variables and its scale income. Therefore, CCR can better describe resource allocation, such as an actual gap and a change of human resources in community services during the coronavirus epidemic.
Big data analysis of public opinion is a means to track the opinions and demands of network users under specific circumstances, which has been widely used in public management, marketing, and other disciplines [
8]. Co-word analysis is a common method of bibliometrics and is a kind of content analysis. Its basic principle is to count the occurrences of a group of keywords in the text and reflect the strength of correlations between these keywords through a series of analytical work. Finally, it shows the core content of the text [
9]. Its advantage is that it can collect real-time content of Internet information, 24 h a day. The obtained information can be fully retrieved and automatically updated. It can be used to analyze the evolution of public opinion themes and the analysis of time trends, especially for the complex needs of people’s livelihoods under emergencies. Social network analysis (SNA) is a commonly used quantitative analysis method in sociology and reduces unreasonable clusterings. Therefore, constructing a co-occurrence network knowledge map for the relationship between the high-frequency keywords of service types and service demands can make the research results more credible [
10]. With 904 million netizens in China, the Internet has become an important place for people to express their opinions. During the epidemic, the Internet has become the main place for people to talk about their needs and to seek help [
11]. The co-keyword analysis of network text is one of the commonly used methods used to analyze service content and demands, which can reflect the changes in community service content and demand more intuitively through the co-occurrence analysis of high-frequency keywords.
This study defined the representative stages of the epidemic situation according to the changes in epidemic prevention and the control situation in Wuhan, and used public opinion analysis to sort out the actual work items in terms of disease prevention, control, and life services, and to determine the subject of service.
From the perspective of service supply, the changes in service gaps in each stage were objectively assessed based on data envelopment analysis.
From a service demand perspective, residents’ needs and expectations were analyzed based on big data public opinion analysis, and the change in community service attention content from the residents’ perspectives is presented.
Wuhan has now entered the normal period of epidemic prevention and control. The city now turns its attention back to socio-economic development and the basic infection prevention measures. Communities will play an important role. This study scientifically evaluated the previous model of epidemic prevention and control work in the community to provide experience for the normal period of prevention and control to offer a basis for new work concerns and to give a reference for management models in different countries.
4. Discussion
4.1. Unreasonable Staff Assignments and the Structure of Community Services in the Early Stage of the Epidemic
At the beginning of the epidemic, the Wuhan community was faced with a lack of workers. Furthermore, a lack of professional health knowledge and inadequate protective measures cramped health-related work, such as the registration and transportation of patients, which greatly affected the implementation efficiency of epidemic prevention policies. These problems may have had something to do with the insufficient participation of community hospitals in the epidemic prevention and the control process since they failed to fully play the role of community medical practitioners in grass-roots prevention and control.
4.2. Community Services Optimized the Supply and Matched the Demand after the Adjustment of the Government Policy
Community services are important when fighting against an epidemic and maintaining people’s life quality, where the focus of services changed with the development of the epidemic and the needs of residents [
14]. The results of the co-word analysis in this study showed that when the government adopted a policy of supplementing and refining services, the content of community objective services gradually transformed from epidemic prevention and control to comprehensive services. The transformation matched the change of the demand for community service and was consistent with the trend of the residents’ subjective expectations for community services during the epidemic. At the same time, with people having more chances to get medical help, the mortality rate was continuously decreasing, which indicated that the optimization of community service had a positive impact on epidemic prevention
4.3. As a Part of Urban Governance, Community Construction in China Needs to Strengthen Its Infrastructure
In China, the community has long faced a law dilemma. Characterized as the neighborhood committee, the community is burdened with a lot of administrative work but its legal status has been a gray area. A community is basically defined by the constitution as an urban grass-roots mass autonomous organization in China. It plays an extremely important role in urban communities. During the epidemic, the lower law was insufficient to cover the organic functions that communities performed, such as the mechanisms of the community and community medical institutions. In order to fully provide a public health function, the community needed legal support. Furthermore, community medical institutions should be included in the main body of community governance to assist in the epidemic prevention and the health maintenance work of the residents in the normal period.
4.4. Limitations of the Study
When using the DEA model to analyze the efficiency of community services in different stages, we only considered the number of community workers without analyzing the community workers capability and professional literacycapability. Furthermore, the number of community residents that came from the official community website was static data and could not reflect the changes in the community population in different periods. As an independent evaluation, the DEA’s results could not identify whether the community service system had reached an optimal state since the method did not take the input–output lag and sustainable characteristics into consideration.
Young people are the main population that expresses their personal opinions through the Internet. It is difficult to get the needs and opinions from the elderly and the infants via network monitoring and analysis. The data of the community services released by official channels and authoritative media may be slightly different from the actual services of various communities. The semantic analysis of words and sentences in the network text is easily influenced by personal subjectivity, and there is no set of fixed standards.
5. Conclusions
5.1. The Improvement of Community Services Will Play an Important Role in Epidemic Prevention and Urban Governance
During the epidemic, the Wuhan community was a typical and complex example of a health emergency community. Its practical elements included the community streets as autonomous organizations, primary medical institutions, and some commercial property organizations. Its responsibilities had various public attributes, such as public health, emergency support, and life services. The specific responsibilities included participating in the comprehensive management of sanitation; improving the public health environment in the community; assisting in the screening, transit, and treatment of patients; providing life service for non-COVID-19 patients and ordinary residents in the middle and late period of the anti-epidemic work. The community not only served as the undertaking organization of the public health emergency system but also fulfilled the typical urban governance role obligations. Their work enabled the epidemic prevention information to be released to the community in a timely manner, help patients with difficulties to effectively connect to an appropriate hospital, and allow for residents who are afraid to leave their homes for the risk of infection get help in life, which is of great significance to the prevention and control of the epidemic, the stability of order, and the recovery of the city. Some mature working modes and reasonable service contents will provide good methods for the whole city to deal with unexpected public health events and normal governance.
In the middle and late stages of the epidemic, the content of the community services gradually transformed from epidemic prevention and control to comprehensive services. The “residential economy,” which was magnified by isolation, significantly increased its dependence on community commerce, showing great potential. The “one-kilometer life circle” community business development space was greatly enhanced. In addition to the anti-epidemic measures, the complex and in-depth community economic activities were also constantly unfolding. The community paid close attention to the relevant policies of the government, examined the policies benefiting the people, provided answers and suggestions to the businesses according to the multi-dimensional problems with free consultation, continuously released the capital bonus, reduced the enterprise pressure, strengthened the business circle linkage, and activated the entity power framework platform. This established a commercial linkage mechanism to identify the needs of the people and the services that enterprises could provide during the epidemic period, connected each information transmission and resource dock, realized mutual benefits and win-win situations with strictly implemented measures, developed a safety net for epidemic prevention and control within the community, created a good business environment, and carried out the implementation of epidemic prevention and control measures, such as environmental sanitation, while correcting the deviation in time and ordering relevant subjects to check for errors and correct the measures used immediately.
As an economic organization with a unique social and economic development, the community had a unique microeconomic foundation regarding how to play the city’s function and promote economic growth. Doing a good job in community commerce is to meet the needs of the people’s livelihood. After the baptism of the epidemic situation, with the change of the consumption demand of the citizens, the community commerce aimed to find the right combination point and deeply investigated the market trend to understand the community concept and community service consciousness. After that, it repeatedly optimized and enriched the business planning, stimulated and enhanced the market vitality of the new area in the post epidemic era, met the needs of residents, expanded the new scale of community commerce, built and invested, and strived to create a model of community commerce under the new normal. In combination with the rigid demands of residents for community commerce, this new normal should also bridge the consideration of artistic, cultural, and professional services of community commerce; encourage more new consumption; upgrade consumption formats, such as healthcare, that are generated in the process of epidemic prevention and control. More online and offline services and scenes will continue to be integrated to boost the development of more enterprises and wake up the city’s stronger vitality.
5.2. The Improvement of Community Public Health Capacity Plays a Fundamental Role in Responding to Public Health Emergencies
The experience of community epidemic prevention and control work in Wuhan suggests that it was necessary to continuously optimize the deployment of community human resources, especially the number and capacity of health technicians in the community, for which their professional performance mad them better guide administrators and business people in community service, thus improving the coping efficiency. Selecting and rewarding excellent community doctors for guidance and consultation in community daily public health work should not be limited to the care of common and chronic diseases. Detailed community public health emergency guidelines should be issued and community hospital staff skills training should be organized in response to public health emergencies. These initiatives will be useful for enhancing the capacity of the community regarding public health services.
In the application of epidemic situation tracking, China allowed for the full mobilization ability of grassroots communities, implemented carpet tracking and grid management, implemented prevention and control measures to households and people, and provided mass and stable prevention and control. Through the establishment and improvement of epidemic prevention and control mechanisms and the grid work system, China built a full-time and part-time work team to fully support medical staff and family doctors in primary medical and health institutions. With the joint efforts of the student team, the big data platform was integrated to improve the sensitivity and refinement of tracking. To ensure the tracking of people, registration, community management, door-to-door observation, the community strengthened the services and observation of key groups, in combination with property management, conforming to the inquiry, temperature measurements, registration, and other processes; furthermore, it carried out effective transportation with superior medical institutions to achieve the epidemic prevention and control goal of the “prevention of import, spread, and output,” and providing convenient and quick registration and filing channels for the masses by means of information technology. At the same time, to comprehensively improve the effectiveness of the epidemic prevention and control and provide effective support throughout the whole region, a person leaving or arriving responded to a questionnaire by scanning a two-dimensional code through WeChat, filling in the information, such as name, ID card number, contact number, residential address, work unit and time of going out (return), reason for going out, destination (origin), return time, and body temperature. After the community personnel clicked the report button to complete the information registration and filing, the district grid management service center made a daily statistics summary flow and organized and reported the information and data submitted by the personnel to the superior department.
5.3. The Chinese Community Governance Model Is Unique and Shared
The self-government management mode of the American community is mainly realized by non-profit organizations and volunteers, which are used as leverage to manage and serve the community, forming a partnership with the government. The government guides and supervises the work of social intermediary organizations and volunteers, which also plays an important role in maintaining social stability. The community governance in Singapore is dominated by the government. With the combination of autonomy, the government provides methods to guide the community to carry out autonomous management, guides social organizations and enterprises to actively participate in community construction, and jointly establishes and improves the community service ecological network by providing corresponding assistance for different groups and expanding the full space for the development of community organizations.
During the epidemic period, the Chinese community governance was unique, though it is still worth learning from. During the epidemic period, the Wuhan municipal government used the market mechanism to introduce commercial services to enrich the human resources of community services and strengthened the anti-epidemic force, developed and applied a community service docking platform through an innovative service model to respond to residents’ dynamic demands, realized the service contents and comprehensively arranged personnel around a fixed-point, improved the use efficiency of funds, and promoted the development of related industries. In fact, through the practice of community service optimization during the epidemic period, scientific urban governance was promoted in the normal period. According to local conditions, other countries can also use mature commercial service supply channels to enrich anti-epidemic forces by means of market purchases, encouraging enterprises to participate, developing community service docking platforms and apps, responding to the needs of residents, setting up service contents and arranging personnel, and exploring various methods of urban governance during an epidemic period.