CRI听力:Community Doctors and Individuals in China Frontier of Preventing Hypertension

China has 270 million hypertension patients.

It is a particularly acute social problem in this rapidly aging society.

With its overcrowded general hospitals and a healthcare system in the process of a large-scale reform, there have long been calls for China to adopt a more effective strategy in dealing with the medical condition.

Experts are suggesting the ideal approach to prevent hypertension is altering lifestyle in the first place although this is not an easy task.

Secretary General of Asia Pacific Society of Hypertension, Trefor Morgan, expresses the importance of effective public policies in dealing with hypertension.

"It requires the government to be aware of the problem and be prepared to take legislative actions to reduce sodium content food."

Morgan says when it comes to the basic healthcare system to deal with hypertension, the authorities in China have done a pretty good job.

"The government of China is very aware of the problem of hypertension and has programs to try to improve and prevent hypertension. The real thing is to prevent the hypertension developing and if you have hypertension you need to treat it. So it is a very important long-term problem."
One of the approaches the Chinese authorities have taken in recent years is to deal with hypertension at the community level.

Official with the National Center of Cardiovascular Disease Chen Weiwei, says community doctors have been tasked with being the frontier to prevent the disease.

"The awareness rate of hypertension is now 46 percent while the therapeutic ratio lies at 41 percent. The disease control rate rose to 13.8 percent. All of these lead to the significant drop of the death rate of stroke."

President of the China Hypertension League, Wu Zhaosu, says apart from building an effective hypertension prevention and treatment system on the community level, the public should be told to be more aware and take their own precaution.

"The problem is that people are not very educated about the occurrence of the hypertension. So our future goal is to teach people and educate people about how to prevent hypertension."

Experts believe this people's approach of dealing with chronic diseases is not just economically wise in China - it is the way it should be.

That is CRI's Zhou Jingnan reporting.