From Healthy China 2020 to Healthy China 2030 Seven decades ago, China’s healthcare was characterised by barefoot doctors who demonstrated the contribution of primary care to improved population health. Subsequent reform, however, restructured the healthcare delivery model to focus on providing curative care in a market driven system as opposed to spending on preventive care. […]
Category: China
Daoxin Yin: A long way to go to help people with depression in China
At the last mid Autumn festival holiday—a traditional festival for a family reunion in China—a young actor and singer with a promising future committed suicide at the age of 28. He had been diagnosed with depression and treated for many years. In response to his last blog on Sina Weibo—a hybrid of Twitter and Facebook with hundreds of […]
Tong Yongjun: Stop killing Chinese doctors
In less than three months four Chinese doctors have been killed by patients. In one case, a general physician’s 10 year-old child was also stabbed. Violence towards doctors is nothing new in China. The Lancet has been following the trend for years. Almost 50% of Chinese medical staff were insulted during their daily work. The Chinese […]
Heidi Larson et al: Vaccine crisis in China—act now to rebuild confidence
The recent unfolding of a five year old story of two million doses of vaccines illegally procured and sold across China is a confidence breaker. Worse, it is not a new episode of abusing a public health good for personal financial gain, but the latest of a series of public health incidents in China. Twenty nine companies have […]
Xiaoning Zhang: The two child policy in China
For the past thirty seven years the Chinese government has carried out a strict one child policy. In 2015 the policy was phased out, and a two child policy was introduced. The national implementation of the two child policy could reform and improve family planning service management and promote the balanced development of the population. […]
Aeesha NJ Malik: Teaching surgery in rural China—who are we benefitting?
I recently bumped into a colleague I hadn’t seen for a while at a conference. He started asking me about a short trip I had made with a Chinese charity to teach cataract surgery in rural China. They had asked him to teach too and he was wondering what it was like and, importantly, what […]
Zhihua Zheng et al: Changing the perspective of off-label drug use in China
Until recently off-label drug use was controversial in China, as there is no legislation on it. Compared to on-label use, a lack of research for off-label use is deemed a risk to the patient. Nevertheless, some clinical practice cannot be done without off-label drug use. Sometimes off-label use of a drug is the only chance […]
Zhongjie He et al: China’s “Emergency Platinum Ten Minutes” Programme
In any accident scene, rapid removal of the casualty to hospital improves their chances of survival. The term “Golden Hour” was first introduced in 1961 by R Adams Cowley, [1] but because of many misinterpretations as to what period this actually referred to, [2 3] a second concept, the “Platinum Ten Minutes” was proposed as […]
China’s semantic trick with prisoner organs
By Kirk C Allison, Norbert W Paul, Michael E Shapiro, Charl Els, and Huige Li. On 3 December 2014, the director of the China Organ Donation Committee and former vice-minister of health, Huang Jiefu, announced that China would cease using death-row prisoners’ organs for transplantation after January 2015. Since then, many medical professionals and international […]
The challenges China faces as it stops using organs from executed prisoners
From 1 January 2015, China stopped using organs from executed prisoners for transplants. This was announced by Jiefu Huang, China’s former vice minister of health and current head of the Organ Donation Committee. This comes after a series of legislative frameworks for organ donation and transplantation since 2007, as well as several pilot programmes that were conducted between […]