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Too few qualified healthcare workers
By Zhang Feng (China Daily)
Updated: 2004-04-08 23:40
What's the weakest link in China's healthcare system?
Finance, infrastructure and governmental attention are all candidates, but
Vice-Minister of Health Gao Qiang Thursday suggested it might be the shortage of
qualified professionals, particularly in rural areas and the public healthcare
system.
Bolstering medical service and improving the public's ability to ward off
infectious diseases are seen by Gao's ministry as priority tasks over the next
few years.
Learning from the outbreak of SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome), the
central government has made great efforts to improve China's public healthcare
system and medical service in the rural areas.
These efforts include increasing financial investment, building
infrastructure, and revamping policy and programmes, Gao said at a two-day
national health conference that opened Thursday in Beijing.
"However, one thing might be most important and it has been ignored. We must
greatly strengthen talent-building in the various health fields," Gao told the
conference.
Without qualified people, the investment, advanced equipment and various
improvement projects will mean nothing, he noted.
Official statistics indicate the rural areas, with 70 per cent of the
country's population, have less than 30 per cent of the medical resources.
Moreover, high-level healthcare professionals usually do not want to work in
rural areas, choosing instead to throng to big city hospitals.
Nationwide, the number of doctors with a master's degree or higher accounts
for less than 1.5 per cent of their total.
In the public health system, the situation is even worse, Gao said, noting:
"In many disease control centres (CDC) at the county level I have visited, about
90 per cent of the staff are not professional workers."
Gao's concerns were echoed by Li Malin, vice-president of Kunming Medical
College, who told China Daily that medical students usually hesitate to work in
CDCs due to the poor attention from government and society, and low-level
income.
And in Chinese medical universities, public health education has long been
ignored. For example, for every 50 students majoring in public health, more than
1,000 are pursuing degrees in the field of clinical healthcare.
The shortage of qualified doctors and public healthcare workers is also
greatly impacting the control of HIV/AIDS, said Gui Xi'en.
Gui is a renowned HIV/AIDS expert who first discovered the HIV/AIDS epidemic
among hundreds of farmers in Central China's Henan Province was caused by
illegal blood sales.
Gui said there is a serious lack of experienced doctors in the HIV/AIDS
epidemic areas, and most of the work of providing free anti-virus medicines for
AIDS patients is being done by village doctors who usually have little knowledge
of anti-AIDS treatments.
As a result many rural HIV/AIDS sufferers have given up on the treatment or
refused to take the drugs under medical supervision, Gui said.
The Ministry of Health will increrase efforts to improve the training of
doctors, trying to change the situation that advanced skills are reserved for
doctors in big medical institutes, Gao said.
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