Remedy sought
With a shortage of pediatricians and inadequate medical facilities, bringing children to hospital can cause a lot of stress to parents. Some experts have suggested a change in parents’ attitude and adoption of an alternative medical model. Liu Zhihua repo
Experts call for change as inadequate facilities and a shortage of pediatricians cause stress for parents taking children to hospitals.
Serving about 1.3 billion people, China’s healthcare system is perhaps the world’s busiest and most pressured.
For patients, that means a painful process of accessing public hospitals and doctors. For those with sick children, the situation is worse because of inadequate medical facilities and manpower for pediatric care.
There is a shortage of at least 200,000 pediatricians in China currently, according to K. K. Cheng, a professor with University of Birmingham, who specializes in epidemiology and the development of primary care in China.
Yang Dan, a Chongqing resident and mother to a 3-year-old boy says she detests taking her child to the hospital.
The air circulation is poor. The area is noisy. It is so overcrowded that parents have to hold their children in their arms for intravenous infusion procedures. There have been cases of parents losing their children in the disorganized environment.
Yet sending their children to small hospitals is out of the question, because they cannot provide quality healthcare, Yang believes. She says once her son was misdiagnosed even in the largest hospital in Ya’an, a medium-size city in Sichuan province.
With the disparity in healthcare quality between rural and urban regions, between a top-level hospital and a less-privileged one, most Chinese parents share the belief that small hospitals are incompetent.
In 2012, Capital Institute of Pediatrics, a top children’s specialist hospital in Beijing, received 2.04 million people who sought outpatient treatments, or three times its capacity, according to Wang Tianyou, the deputy president.
The condition is worse in regions with fewer hospitals.
West China Women’s and Children’s Hospital, in Chengdu, Sichuan province, a small hospital of only 11,333 square meters, recorded 1.7 million yearly visits, mostly sick children, according to its president Mu Dezhi.
Zhu Zhu, mother of a 6-year-old boy in Beijing, compares visiting a good hospital to obtaining a train ticket during the Spring Festival peak travel season. She says the doctors are usually bad-tempered.
“When children get sick, parents are extremely anxious and worried, but it always takes at least three hours to line up outside the doctor’s room. When we finally get to see the doctor, they spend less than three minutes on the child,” Zhu says.
It always takes at least three hours to line up outside the doctor’s room. When we finally get to see the doctor, they spend less than three minutes on the child.”
ZHU ZHU, MOTHER OF A 6-YEAR-OLD BOY IN BEIJING
“Besides, the hospital staff members are normally very impatient and reticent.”
A Beijing resident who only wants to be known as Liu Lan, says her blood boils whenever she recalls her experience in a top children’s specialist hospital in Beijing.
Her son, now 6, had severe oral ulcers when he was 3, and examinations indicated abnormality in his blood. After over a year of visiting the hospital, where her son underwent a series of blood tests, a bone marrow examination, and various medication, his doctor, a top expert in children’s blood diseases, discharged the boy, saying he didn’t have leukemia.
Liu thought her son was cured, but soon after, the boy developed severe oral ulcers again, and blood test showed he was still ill.
“What makes me most angry is, the expert told me from the very beginning that I should have another child … It is as if my son was dying.
“To see the expert, I took my son to the VIP department of the hospital. It was expensive. But she didn’t even tell us the truth that she had failed to make a diagnosis,” Liu says.
While parents feel angry and disappointed that doctors don’t stand in their shoes, doctors also complain that parents hold unrealistic expectations about their performance.
“Good hospitals for children are always packed with people, and we are so busy seeing more than 100 patients a day,” says Jiang Yuwu, director of the pediatrics department of Peking University First Hospital.
“Parents complain that doctors only spend one to two minutes on their children, say a few words, and are irresponsible. But for those of us with 100 patients a day, if we spend too much time on one patient, we can’t finish our work, and it is unfair to others.
“We have to be focused and fast, but we are just humans, and we become tired and irritated because of work overload day in, day out.”
K. K. Cheng, the public health expert, who is also dean of the general practice department with Peking University Health Science Center, comments that in the world’s most recognized children’s hospitals in countries such as Canada, Britain and the United States, the lines are not so long because those hospitals are only for patients with severe or complex conditions.
“It is time to adopt an alternative model that strengthens primary care and communitybased hospitals and clinics,” Cheng says.