Filling in the gaps of pediatric care a pressing priority
Print Edition
GRACE Guo dreads the risk of her 4-year-old daughter falling ill.
“It means my whole family has to fight a battle in the hospital,” said Guo. “We had to wait hours to see a doctor for just a few minutes when she once came down with a high fever. I had to go from one counter to the next — registering here, paying there. My parents, who came with us, had to take turns holding my sick daughter because all the seats in the waiting area were filled.”
Her husband, meanwhile, was cruising the streets and parking lots trying to find a place to park the family car.
China’s new policy allowing couples to have a second child is placing pressure on an already over-stretched system of pediatric care.
The 2015 China Health Statistics Yearbook reports 112,800 pediatricians, or 3.9 percent of all doctors in the country. With 226 million children in China, that means about one pediatrician for every 2,000 children, below the levels found in developed countries.
Many medical students tend to shy away from pediatrics because of heavy workloads, the difficulties of diagnosing babies and small children, and pressure they face from overwrought parents.
According to one report, China had only 92 children’s hospitals in 2014, or 0.4 percent of all hospitals, and more than 70 percent of them were in larger cities.
Guo was disappointed once she and her daughter finally did get to see a doctor.
“I really don’t think the doctors examine the children as carefully as they should because they feel pressure of long waiting queues,” she said.
Health authorities are trying to tackle the problem. In 2007, the School of Medicine at Shanghai Jiao Tong University re-established its pediatric department and started to admit pediatric majors into its clinical medicine school in 2012.
The Shanghai Children’s Medical Center Affiliated to Jiao Tong School of Medicine is considered an outstanding model of hospital services, education and research.
The pediatric department teaches more than 100 students a year. It is also tied into the Ottawa-Shanghai Joint School of Medicine, a Sino-Canadian venture set up in 2014. It currently enrolls about 60 students. It’s also the first training center for doctors after Shanghai began fully implementing a system requiring all doctors to receive standardized training. The center recruits about 30 pediatricians every year. It has trained 207 local pediatricians to date.
In 2013, a clinical medical college providing both academic degree education and continuous medical education for students after gradation was set up.
In 2014, the Shanghai government established the National Children’s Medical Center, led by Jiao Tong University and the Shanghai Children’s Medical Center. It linked pediatric hospitals and departments across China for treatment, research, education, preventative medicine and children’s diseases that are difficult to cure.
It’s not only a hospital for children in critical condition, but also a center for training doctors, monitoring major children’s diseases and conducting research and clinical application.
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