CRI听力: China in Urgent Need of Pediatricians

While there are about one and a half pediatricians for every thousand children in the United States, the ratio in China is one thousand children to a quarter of a pediatrician. Experts warn that there is a critical shortage of 200,000 pediatricians in China, and the deficiency will hardly be corrected within the next decade.

Let's follow Yingying to take a closer look at Beijing Children's Hospital.




It's 10 a.m. at Beijing Children's Hospital. Crying children and anxious parents have jammed every corridor and waiting room.

Yang Juan, a young mother is waiting anxiously outside a consulting room, with a coughing baby in her arms. She and her husband have come from neighboring Hebei Province. They arrived at the hospital at 3 a.m. to queue up for patient registration.
 
"Our local hospital couldn't provide effective treatment, so we came to Beijing. We rented a small hotel room next to the hospital, so that we could register as early as possible."

The current number of pediatric hospitals in China accounts for only 0.52 percent of the total number of hospitals throughout the country. Most of them are overburdened with too many patients. Although many general hospitals in China have pediatric departments, their scale is shrinking due to a lack of pediatricians.

Chen Chunling is Vice President of Beijing Royal Integrative Medicine Hospital. She says the pediatric department makes less profit compared to other medical departments.

"Almost all the adults have medical insurance, but most children don't. Their medical costs are paid by their parents. In the pediatric department at general hospitals, doctors' salaries are lower compared to those of other doctors. This department doesn't have good financial support."

It is reported that Chinese universities stopped offering pediatrics as an undergraduate major in 1999, which cut off a stable source of medics for the specialist field. And even among medical postgraduates, pediatrics is not a popular specialty.

Zhang Xiao'e, a pediatric postgraduate at Shanghai Medical College of Fudan University, says only those who were rejected by other departments have chosen to major in pediatrics at her university.

"No one would like to be a pediatrician. Because children don't know how to express their symptoms, the misdiagnosis rate is very high. Even those experienced pediatricians would have to take a chance on getting in trouble with lawsuits."

Statistics indicate the number of pediatric doctors in China increased by only 5,000 in the past 15 years.

This is why experts suggest that pediatrics be restored as an undergraduate major as soon as possible.

They call on the central government to list pediatric development in public health services in the country's 12th Five-Year Plan and establish more children's hospitals throughout the country.

For CRI, I'm Yingying.