Low pay is weak medicine for doctors in suburbs

Beijing has been trying a number of ways to staff its grassroots healthcare providers with more general practitioners, yet doctors say they need better pay to continue.

In 2012, the city had 11,702 doctors, including about 5,800 GPs, said Zong Baoguo of the city’s health bureau.

“It needs another 10,000 GPs to achieve the goal of one GP for every 600 households,” he said.

To deal with the shortage, health service centers have recruited 1,500 medical college graduates from other cities since 2008.

Training programs for medical professionals, such as pediatricians, gynecologists and doctors of traditional Chinese medicine, have been held to move them into general practice, according to Zong.

Since 2006, Capital Medical University has trained about 400 medical students in general medicine for health service centers in suburban Beijing, which is less appealing to job seekers because of its less developed economy. Only 171 graduated and started working suburban centers, according to Zong.

Last year the city launched a program to train about 1,000 medical workers currently at community health service centers to better manage the skills of general medicine and to help design policies on public primary care.

The government is also trying to increase salaries for GPs, Zong said.

“The annual income for workers at Beijing’s grassroots health providers has been increasing in recent years to an average of 74,000 yuan ($12,000),” he said.

Yet for Duan Yinan, a GP at Qinghe Community Health Service Center in Haidian district, the salary level is not satisfactory.

It is hard for his center to recruit enough doctors at only 4,000 yuan a month, he said, citing distance from downtown Beijing as a contributing factor.

According to the central government’s plan, a medical student who wants to become a GP should spend another three years in special training after finishing a five- year undergraduate course.

“Yet not many medical students want to spend another three years on general medicine, as the salary they will get hardly matches the eight years of education,” Duan said.