China's healthcare system - my article from Australian Doctor magazine

by Michael Woodhead

[NOTE: I WILL BE IN CHINA UNTIL JULY, NO BLOGGING UNTIL THEN. IN THE MEANTIME, HERE'S MY ARTICLE FROM MY DAY JOB]:

The Chinese have a saying: "Kan bing nan, kan bing gui," which roughly translates as "It's difficult and expensive to see a doctor".

This is evident at 8am in the foyer of a hospital in Kunming, the largest city in Yunnan Province, south-west China. There are lengthy queues to obtain one of the coveted ‘registration tickets' necessary to see a doctor, and arguments are breaking out among those who have been lining up for hours.

This is the frontline of healthcare in China because there is no primary care gatekeeper system to filter and triage.

Since the early hours, scores of people with minor ailments have arrived, hoping to claim a place in one of the outpatient clinics. Many of them are poor families from rural areas, who have come to the city because they have little faith in their primitive township clinics and under-trained barefoot doctors.

To see a doctor at a Chinese hospital, you first have to register and pay a cash deposit. However, the unrest in this morning's hospital queue has been triggered for another reason.

Because of the value of the registration tickets, scalpers exploit the economic possibilities and are brazenly working the queue, reselling tickets for many times their face value. And faced with long and often unsuccessful waits to get a clinic appointment, there is no shortage of willing buyers.

This is the reality for China's creaking healthcare system, which, through a mixture of underfunding and half-baked reforms, embodies the worst of both communist and capitalist healthcare models — long waits combined with high cost.

Hospitals are state-owned enterprises that receive meagre funding from government following the market reforms of the 1990s. The basic cost of a medical consultation is pegged by law at round 20 yuan ($4).

To cover their operating costs, hospitals resort to a wide range of surcharges that inflate medical bills. They have also come to rely on the commissions they charge on medicines, tests and procedures.

While most Chinese citizens are, in theory, covered by a national health insurance system, in practice, the caps, exclusions and lack of portability of these policies means that most people still face high out-of-pocket fees. Healthcare in China is strictly user-pays: no cash, no care.

‘Infusion room' syndrome
All this can create perverse incentives. For instance, the reliance of hospitals' budgets on drug mark-ups means that there is widespread overprescribing and overtreatment.

This is evident in the ‘infusion parlour' of the general medical outpatients clinic of the Kunming hospital.

The large room is filled with rows of seats, along which sit patients hooked up to IV drips delivering antibiotics or ‘tonics'. This is the routine first-line treatment for any patient with a fever, cough, cold or gastro complaint in China.

The hospital charges about 100 yuan ($20) per infusion — a healthy profit for them but unhealthy for patients who need only simple analgesics, fluids and rest.

"Hospitals giving infusions for minor illness has become a long-established bad habit, which is one of the important factors for antibiotic drug misuse," according to Professor Wu Yunming of Xuzhou Medical College in Jiangsu Province.

"Hospitals are businesses, and infusions represent a significant source of revenue for them."

To be fair to China's doctors, it is not individual greed or ignorance on their part that drives this poor practice.

Chinese doctors know antibiotic infusions are not best practice for minor illnesses, but infusions have become embedded in routine care because doctors depend on commissions for about a quarter of their monthly income.

The basic salary of a hospital resident is about 4000 yuan ($800) a month, equivalent to that of an entry-level public servant or teacher.

However, their contract includes performance bonuses of a further 1500 yuan ($300) — the so-called ‘grey income' — which doctors receive if they meet prescribing quotas in line with the hospital's revenue targets.

Senior doctors, especially those working in procedural specialities such as orthopaedics, can make considerably larger sums of money from commissions.

The government is trying to tackle this well-recognised cause of overservicing by banning drug commissions and allowing hospitals to charge higher consultation fees.

However, the early signs from pilot programs carried out in regional and rural healthcare facilities suggest that hospitals simply shift from drug mark-ups to additional fees for services.

Violence against doctors
Unsurprisingly, this mix of overservicing and overcharging is a source of widespread public distrust of doctors and hospitals. The feelings of being short-changed extend to the short consultation times.

The 80/20 rule, which prohibits GPs from billing 80 or more services on 20 or more days a year, is used by Medicare in Australia as a benchmark of poor care. But not so in China, where doctors working in clinics routinely see 80-100 patients during a four-hour shift.

"I'm so busy I don't even have time for toilet breaks, let alone lunch. I eat at my desk," one doctor told me during my visit to the hospital in Kunming last year.

A patient can expect to be with the doctor for about three minutes — six minutes if they are lucky. The perfunctory nature of such medical consultations means some patients resort to verbal and physical aggression to vent their frustration over perceived mistakes or miscommunication. Violent attacks against medical staff are commonplace.

In a survey by the Chinese Medical Doctor Association, more than 60% of doctors said they had been subjected to physical abuse and 13% had been physically assaulted in 2015. That year, there were 115,000 reported disputes in hospitals with 4600 serious "security incidents" leading to 1425 arrests.

There have also been several widely reported fatal attacks against doctors by disgruntled patients or their family members.

The most recent, in early May 2016, saw an emergency surgeon bludgeoned to death at a Hunan hospital by relatives of a traffic accident victim. After they were arrested, the assailants claimed the doctor had "not been vigorous enough" in treating their relative and had told them to wait their turn, according to Xinhua News Agency.

Such attacks have led to walkouts and public demonstrations by medical staff calling for authorities to crack down on violence.

On each occasion, the government has vowed to "strike hard" against offenders, but aside from ordering hospitals to hire more security guards, little has been done in reality.

Some doctors have taken to wearing personal protective gear such as stab-proof vests to work.

Primary care the solution?
China's health ministry is well aware of these problems and has two strategies to relieve the burden on hospitals: privatisation and primary care.

One of the key healthcare reforms underway in China at present is a move to bring "social capital" (namely, private investors) into the hospital sector. To encourage this, the Chinese government has relaxed laws to allow private operators to set up hospitals, with pharmaceutical companies taking a lead in the sector.

Just as importantly, China's health ministry has also eased employment regulations for doctors so that they are no longer tied to state-owned hospitals and have the freedom to work where they please.

In the past year, there has been a rapid increase in the number of ‘independent doctor groups' being set up to run private clinic services — the Chinese equivalent of US groupings such as the Mayo Clinic.

China's second major healthcare reform is a plan to boost the primary care system. This is a much tougher challenge. The current ‘community clinic' sector is very much an underdeveloped and under-resourced poor cousin to the culturally prestigious hospital system.

Some of the reasons may sound familiar. Few of China's doctors are willing to work in community clinics because the pay is poor, the clinics have little equipment and, unlike the hospital system, there is little prospect for promotion or career advancement.

China's health ministry has set itself a goal of having one family practitioner for every 2000 citizens by 2020 (the GP-patient ratio in Australia is around one FTE GP for every 1080 people).

But to meet this target, China would have to train an additional 400,000 medical practitioners. The scale of this task can be grasped by the fact that there are only 170,000 doctors in training, of whom 13,000 are in the generalist community practitioner training stream.

Primary care pilot projects have been trialled in China's major cities such as Shanghai and Shenzhen, but with mixed results.

They are declared a success by their proponents, on the basis of achieving 90% enrolments in their areas. However, there is still a marked reluctance among the Chinese public to actually use community clinics as the first port of call. Most still make a beeline for the major hospitals, which are still seen as the ‘centres of excellence' for medical care.

China's health ministry — like so many Australian governments — is nevertheless proclaiming that primary care is the way of the future for healthcare. They have also been mixing carrot-and-stick approaches to encourage the public to use primary care clinics, such as offering free consultations, but also making it mandatory to get a GP referral for a hospital appointment.

The ministry has also ordered that GP training pathways be set up and requires medical schools to introduce ‘primary care pathway' training quotas.

Meanwhile, the effects of a medical system that has embraced the alleged wonders of hospital-based care, can be seen.

Back in the Kunming hospital, by mid-afternoon the corridors are crammed with patients, hanging about at the doors of the clinics in the hope that a doctor will "squeeze them in" at the end of their official list.

But as one doctor told me, "It's too much. I'm supposed to finish at 5pm but most days I'm here for an extra hour or more. I am always late for dinner. I studied medicine for eight years and yet I work longer hours and earn less than a hairdresser."

He adds: "My parents are doctors but I wouldn't want my child to be a doctor."

---

Michael Woodhead is Australian Doctor's clinical editor.

"Three Lows and One Missing" - Is China on target to deploy 700,000 general practitioners? (short answer: no)

by MICHAEL WOODHEAD

Being a medical journalist in Australia, I've come across a few academics and leaders of medical groups who have marvelled at China's stated aim to deploy an additional half a million general practitioners by 2020. In a country where there are 25,000 general practitioners, the numbers are mind boggling and the ambitious target seems laudable. When I say that this may be an unrealistic goal given the current paltry state of primary/community care in China, I am viewed as a something of an overly-negative cynic or even vaguely racist.

It's therefore reassuring to see that my expectations are in line with those of the president of the China Medical Doctor Association, Dr Zhang Yanling. This month the CMDA chief was one of several big potatoes who showed up at the "2016 GP Training Forum and 13th Community Health and General Practice Annual Conference" held in Beijing on 23 April

The main speaker at the meeting was National Health and Family Planning Commission (NHFPC) Deputy Director Liu Qian, who said that creating a primary care system was one of the key aims of China's healthcare reforms. He said the creation of a primary care workforce was seen as an important step by top leaders such as Xi Jinping and Li Keqiang, who sent a message to the conference to make serious efforts to implement the policy.

Director Liu made the usual top bureaucrat exhortations to strengthen/promote/deepen reform of the medical education system to make this so. However, even he was realistic enough to admit that of the current 120,000 medical trainees only 13,000 (about 10%) were training as general practitioners and some of them may be hospital based rather than in community clinics).

He also acknowledged that China's entrenched doctor system was geared towards hospital-based specialists and that there was only weak support for general practitioners. There is no culture of primary care in China and this is reflected in the lack of training opportunities, low social status of community doctors "and the trust of the masses of trust is not high". Unsurprisingly, therefore, being a general practitioner is not a very attractive career option for any would-be doctor.

Director Liu then went on to make more of the usual remarks about strengthening the education system to train more general practitioners and making more efforts in this direction  etc etc

He was followed by Dr Zhang Yanling of the CMDA , who expanded on what the director said by coining the phrase the "Three Lows and One Missing". General practitioners suffer from "Low Pay, Low Motivation, Low Social Status and Missing Education" said Dr Zhang.

He said that in words, China's authorities had expressed strong support for the WHO-expounded principle of primary care and having general practitioners as gatekeepers to the hospital healthcare system. However in practice, general practice was weak, underdeveloped and had only patchy distribution across the country, he noted. While there are some general practitioners in bigger cities and in some regional hospitals, the biggest gap for primary care was in township and smaller county hospitals which were often both understaffed and underused. Dr Zhang used the Chinese saying "Swallows sitting in the doorway" to express the deserted state of China's township hospitals - because patients do not trust the doctors and take their illnesses straight to the bigger hospital "centres of expertise".

Dr Zhang said three things are needed to build a primary care system in China:

1. A commitment to build a large and sustainable primary care workforce based on teams of well trained general practitioners who are well remunerated and have a graded career pathway, similar to hospital doctors, rather than being in a dead end job.

2. A robust training system that ensures the primary care workforce is motivated and highly skilled - including the retraining and upskilling of allied health practitioners and physician assistants to make a primary acre team. Dr Zhang said the current projections were that China should have 1 GP for every 2000 citizens, which would require 700,000 primary care practitioners by 2020. However, based on current training capacity of 172,000 doctors and doctor assistants, there would still be a shortfall of 400-500,000 general practitioners by 2020.

3. Training pathways including residencies will need a partnership between government departments of health and education along with medical professional groups such as the CMDA. Working together they will need to establish a GP training group with well qualified educators that can set standards, plan training place numbers and oversee assessment and accreditation.

Dr Zhang concludes that a general practitioner primary care system is possible so long as there is good policy, clear commitment from government and cooperation from government departments, industry, the profession and good guidance from academics.

The two day conference also heard from a host of academics and experts in primary care from China, Hong Kong and and foreign countries such as Canada and Australia.

We wait in hope to see if the fine words of the conference delegates are actually matched with government funding and backed by policy that is actually implemented.

Heathcare privatisation: China adopts the US model

by MICHAEL WOODHEAD

Prepare for the Mayo Clinic with Chinese Characteristics. This year China is taking the first steps towards creating the equivalent of US group medical practices such as Permanente and the Cleveland Clinic.

The so-called "Doctor Groups" (Yisheng Jituan, 医生集团) are springing up around the country -  mostly in major cities of the affluent Eastern provinces. They are being set up in response to the loosening of the government's rules on how and where doctors can operate - clinicians are no longer tied to the tertiary hospitals and are now being encouraged to be 'fluid' and 'open'. In response, at least fifteen doctor groups have been set up in 2015 and 2016, usually based around one location and with one specialty.

These are not socialist collectives nor are they not-for-profit groups. Instead they are privately financed businesses that are being set up with large investments from major industrial players such as pharmaceutical companies. These are groups that are seeking profits and market share as a return for their investment. Not sure how PRC's Marxist theorists will explain this away.

A typical example is the Yibai Pharmaceutical Anhui Oncology Group. This covers ten leading cancer specialists and their staff, as well as specialist treatment facilities in the Anhui and Shanghai area - services that include diagnostic imaging, radiotherapy, microsurgery and chemotherapy. The pharmaceutical backer has invested hundreds of millions of dollars already and is hoping to use its industry experience and connections to package other services such as pharmacy, supply chain and IT services. According to an investment analyst, the Yibai group is hoping to make 500 million RMB profits within two years.

Yibai is just one example: others include the Medical Imaging Group - an alliance of imaging facilities covering 27 hospitals including the Beijing Union Medical College Hospital, and Beijing PLA General Hospital.

Another doctor group is United Lige, which has a looser structure covering many cities and provinces including Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, Chongqing, Jiangsu and Zhejiang. It aims to bring smaller groups of doctors together in private clinics under the Lige banner.

Others Doctor Groups include

• Sanjia (Mobile phone referral, liaison etc services)
• Mingyi Hui (a multi-speciaity consortium that aims to offer family care from children to the elderly, with an online/telehealth emphasis)
• Song Dong Lei Neurosurgery Group (Shanghai)
• Pumai Doctors Group (collaboration with Chow Tai Fook to set up polyclinics in Shanghai)
• Yongchun Male PLastic Surgery Group ( Shanghai Woxin Hospital)
• Fenlan/Huaxia Pathology Group (Set up with more than 120 pathologists in conjunction with the China Medical Association Pathology Society, this group has received 30 million investment and will provide specialist pathology services via a network of 60 hospitals).
• Famous Doctor Fertility Group (Shenzhen based, set up by veteran Obstetrics and Gynaecology specialist Gong Xiaoming)

Most of the private doctor groups are financed by domestic companies, many with little healthcare experience. But rather than doing joint ventures with western healthcare companies to get foreign know-how, Chinese newcomers to private healthcare are simply buying up foreign healthcare providers. The Luye Medical Group recently bought the Australian private hospital consortium Healthe Care for $938 million. Luye's Charles Wang says the new doctor groups aiming to do business outside the big hospital environment lack operational expertise, and they are hoping to transfer such skills from the Australian outfit to the Chinese market.

This is what he told the Australian Financial Review:

"When things change in China, they tend to happen very fast. Doctors and practitioners forming their own doctor groups is something that never would have happened until last year. They are now leaving the public sector and forming their own groups, and once that gains momentum, you will see it rapidly become more westernised."

According to the AFR, the idea is not to parachute Australian executives into China, but to export the way Australians manage their hospitals, including finances, procurement, risk and clinical control.

"I expect you'll see, in time, structured medical programs, and we'll go up to China and do training and bring middle managers down here in Australia. In clinical areas there will be doctor mentoring and nursing programs,"  says Healthe Care's CEO Steve Atkins.

My own view is that it will take a lot to break up the power of the big hospitals. There are a lot of vested interests involved. The move to private doctor groups also raises the question of what impact this will have on the capacity of the existing public hospital system. If the most talented doctors can work outside the system, who will replace them? If top surgeons take two-three days a week doing private work, who will fill their positions in the public hospitals for clinical work and training?

There are many unknowns, but with official backing from the health minister and the Premier, expect to hear a lot more about Doctor Groups from 2016 onwards.

Why Beijing's war on hospital ticket scalpers is doomed to fail: top cardiologist says jail sentences won't fix supply & demand problem

by MICHAEL WOODHEAD
This week a Beijing court sentenced 15 hospital ticket scalpers to prison sentences varying from 19 months to two years in jail. It's all part of a very public crackdown on the practice of 'entrepreneurs' buying up the hospital clinic reservation numbers (guahao, 挂号) that are needed to gain access to see a doctor. Typically, these hospital tickets cost 20 yuan at the front desk but are bought up and sold for ten or more times their face value by scalpers (piao fanzi, 票贩子) who operate in gangs around the foyers of public hospitals.

In theory, China's hospital clinics operate on a first come, first served basis. Whoever is prepared to queue up early at the hospital ticket window in the morning gets the tickets. In practice, the scalper gangs either send their agents to stand in line and book an appointment - or they have inside connections with hospital staff to procure the tickets through the back door. The corrupt practice has been going on for years, but made headlines in January when a video emerged showing a young rural migrant woman ranting about the scalpers at a Beijing obstetrics hospital. The video went viral on China's social media channels and there was soon public pressure for 'something to be done'.



As in the past, the hospitals and the Beijing health department announced yet another "get tough" campaign on scalpers. They sent in the PSB to round up the usual suspects. They also issued a series of "Five Musts" measures that included real name registration procedures and an end to collusion between hospital staff and scalpers. And as usual, an example has been made of a few offenders in the media. The Party has listened to the masses and taken action. Never mind that the 15 offenders sent to jail weren't actually scalpers, but fraudsters. They had hired hospital rooms in which they used bogus doctors to swindle unsuspecting out-of-towners into jumping the queue and paying for dodgy TCM treatments.

But even if the authorities had enacted a serious and enduring action against hospital ticket scalpers, it still would not make any difference, according to one leading cardiologist.

Professor Yang Qing, has worked at the cardiology department at the Sichuan University Huaxi Hospital for 20 years. He says the problem is not due to the scalpers, who are only the symptoms of a monopolistic system. Professor Yang says it is important also not to blame doctors, who are also constrained by the system.

According to Professor Yang, every day his hospital cardiology clinic in Chengdu is besieged by patients from far and wide, seeking a consultation. Patients come not only from Chengdu, but also from across the province and even from overseas. A typical clinic has 20 allocated slots to see patients with an average consult duration of 6 minutes - but most will actually fit in 30 patients by running over time. Every day at the front desk he is mobbed by people saying: "Professor Yang can you add an extra place for me?" Some are very deserving patients who have traveled a long distance to see him - even renting rooms near the hospital. Others are former patients who want continuity of care and to be followed up by the same treating doctor. And there are also 'insiders' - acquaintances, connections and people who work in the hospital who seek an appointment with him.

Professor Yang says the demand for 'tickets' is inexhaustible and he only has a finite amount of time in a working day. On a typical day he works right through an after noon clinic without a break even to go to the bathroom. He is supposed to finish at 5pm, but usually does not actually finish until at least 6pm. If there is a chance he will add a few extra places, but he says he feels bad for not being able to accept all the requests. And his colleagues all feel the same way. They are not heartless, but they have other responsibilities and things to do - not to mention family life. Professor Yang says that in addition to attending to patients in the outpatient clinic he must also do surgery, supervise junior staff, take part in research and write reports. He must attend medical conferences and teach students.

Professor Yang says that the demand for hospital tickets is high, but the price is low and does not reflect the 'economic value' of the doctors' skill and experience. The scalpers are simply selling the doctor's appointment at a price the market is prepared to pay, he says. And the 'profit' is going to criminal gangs instead of to the hospitals.

Professor Yang says that what the scalpers do is an unsatisfactory and unfair situation, but he believes it is inevitable under a monopoly system. It would be unrealistic to expect them to be stamped out - and even if all the ticket scalpers were removed there would still be an imbalance between supply and demand of medical appointments, he says.

"When a resource is scarce, and when everyone wants to have this resource, the authorities' fight against ticket brokers is meaningless," he says.


Professor Yang says that in theory a system that guarantees low prices is good because it makes treatment affordable for everyone. However, in practice he says low prices enforced within a monopoly lead to low quality care and also to the 'detestable' practice of scalping.
 
Professor Yang's solution is a free market one - free up the doctors to set their own prices and let them manage their own patients. In this way, there will be competition between doctors that will keep prices low and affordable while raising levels of service and quality, he believes.

[Editor's note: Given that they have been given prominent place in the state media, Professor Yang's pro-market comments are presumably endorsed by the government and China's minister for health. It's notable that the learned professor suggests a new model based on the US free market healthcare system, and makes no mention of other more successful models such as the gatekeeper' system of Britain's NHS. 

The kind of problems that Professor Yang describes do not occur in the UK  because that country (like many others) has an efficient primary care gatekeeper system that ensure that patients do not go straight to hospital. To see a hospital specialist, patients in countries such as the UK and Australia must first go to see a community-based general practitioner, who decides if and where they should be referred. This means that patients with minor illness and chronic disease can be managed in the community' rather than clogging up the overloaded hospital system. It also means that patients are sent to the most appropriate specialist. 

Of course the system isn't perfect because financial restraints mean that public hospital patients often have to wait months for an appointment to see the doctor. In countries such as Australia, patients can jump this queue if they have private health insurance (but they still need a GP referral) But if any patient needs urgent care, they can receive it. 

Interestingly, China is pursuing both these options. It is loosening the monopoly of public (actually state-owned for-profit monopoly) hospitals. China is also moving towards a community/family doctor system. However the progress is glacial because of the entrenched financial interests of local governments [and managers] in their local hospital monopoly. So is the solution to hospital scalpers a crackdown, free-market healthcare or a gatekeeper system? You decide ...]

Freelance "Doctor Groups" - the first sign of workforce reforms in China

by MICHAEL WOODHEAD

The creation of some 30 independent "physician groups" (Yisheng Shoutuan, 医生集团) is the first sign of the Chinese government's 2015 relaxation of working regulations for the hospital system. The rules have been relaxed to allow "workforce fluidity" - in other words to allow doctors to work where they wish rather than being bound to a single hospital ( a legacy of the old danwei work unit system).
 he Chinese Nationa Health and Family Planning Commission (NHFPC) wishes to create a more flexible workforce and to allow doctors to work in a more more market-oriented system, supposedly to free up medical talent and overcome the current mismatch in supply and demand for medical services.

It is still early days for these doctor groups, which face problems such as how to engage with hospitals, how ensure high quality medical standards and how to take on medicolegal risk (and insurance). These are things that are usually the responsibility of hospitals and something that doctors have not had to worry about in the past.

To try tackle these issue the Beijing Henghe Hospital has set up a "doctor group collaboration model platform" to try work with doctors towards new ways of working. The group has already started to look towards the US for business and working models for doctors. Initial discussions have revealed that 55% of hospitals have doctors doing some form of 'moonlighting' - and therefore the doctor groups may formalise this working model.

Another survey found that many talented young doctors were leaving the hospital system because of the long hours, high pressure and low pay. A new freelance model may help retain the skills of these doctors, the collaboration discussion group said.

However, other doctors have pointed to the fact that the vast majority of doctors continue to work  in the public hospital system, and they say this system (and its workforce) is already stretched to breaking point. They ask how the public system will cope if many of its 'backbone' doctors reduce their commitment to practising in the hospitals - and also the reduced input in areas such as teaching and mentoring.

The group heard from some leading doctors saying there now had to be a pragmatic approach to developing Doctor-Hospital Partnerships to ensure optimum allocation of medical resources and also recognise the true value of doctors.

In one Doctor Group forum, vascular surgeon Dr Zhang Qiang said there were 10 issues facing doctor groups:
1. Doctor groups are a very vaguely defined concept.
2. Policies have to be open, pragmatic and work with the health ministry and hospitals.
3. What size should doctor groups be? How much will they be worth? And what disciplines will the consist of?
4. How will doctor groups be organised? As private companies? Co-operatives/ Joint ventures?
5. Where will doctor groups be located? In private hospitals? In large institutions or be in stand-alone clinics? Or as flexible visiting doctors?
6. If doctors join freelance groups [how] will they maintain their participation in academia, teaching and research?
7. How will doctor hierarchy and work assignments/responsibilities be arranged in private groups? In the public system there is a clear structure and system of rosters, promotion and responsibility - how will this translate in private groups?
8. How will private doctors interact and communicate online and digitally, if they do not have the support of the government and hospital system? Will there be referrals and shared care?
9. How will freelance doctor groups be financed and where will they find their start up capital from? If there is a share ownership, who will own the shares and control the doctors?
10. Will private doctor groups have clout? For example, in medical insurance will doctor groups have enough buying power and negotiating strength to be able to arrange medicolegal cover, settle medical disputes and influence policy?

China's pharma companies take a stake in public hospitals. What could possibly go wrong?

by MICHAEL WOODHEAD
China's not-very communist health minister Li Bin wants to see hospitals turn to "social capital"(ie private investors). And it is slowly starting to happen. China's 'public' hospitals are currently in a strange place - they are essentially state-owned for-profit enterprises, but bound by an odd mix of rules and regulations that keep some prices in check and yet which allow rampant price gouging and overservicing in areas such as pharmaceuticals. Not for nothing are pharmacies know as the 'gold mine' of hospitals.

To try get rid of the obvious incentives for hospital doctors to overprescribe the government is currently phasing in a ban on drug commissions. They are trying to de-link income from drug sales and hospital revenue.

However it's not clear to me how this squares with the trend for China's pharmaceutical companies to go into partnership with hospitals, and essentially to become their operators. Take the recent deal by the Guangzhou Baiyunshan Pharmaceutical Group to invest in six hospitals in the obscure Shandong city of Jining. The joint venture covers six main hospitals with around 6000 beds and a total annual revenue of 2 billion yuan.

The local health department has 49% stake in the new Jining health provider company, while the pharma company has a 33% stake in return for 5 billion yuan investment. Other stakeholders include investment companies, with between 15% and 2% interests.

Analysts say the new joint venture will allow industrial groups to make profits from controlling supplies of pharmaceuticals as well as medical devices, supplies and equipment. I'm no health economist but I can't see how allowing a pharma company to own and operate all of a city's hospitals is good for the patient. Who decides which drugs are made available at the hospital - and what happens to the competitor products? Also what is to stop overservicing, as we have seen so evidently a problem in the current system?

As a commentator in Caixin magazine concludes:

"With deals like this we need to first be clear what is the purpose of the restructuring of public hospitals, and through the restructuring of what kind of results you want to achieve? These issues need further study and discussion. "

Uber Doctor? China's version of the taxi app just launched a home doctor visit service.

by MICHAEL WOODHEAD
The company that runs China's answer to the Uber app - DiDi, has just launched a home doctor service, called DiDi Doctor. 
A pilot program of the doctor-hailing app is being run out in four cities: Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Nanjing. The services promotes itself as offering a renowned surgeon for private consultations. In its first few days it got 20,000 calls - but only treated 40 patients. The service is being run in cooperation with Ali Health, and is currently being offered for free - for those who can get through. However, feedback on the service has been mixed, with consumers doubting the experience of the doctors involved, and questioning whether they are even entitled to treat patients outside of hospital.

A pregnant woman called Chen who used the service in Shanghai, said she thought it would offer a way to avoid the long waits at the tertiary hospital. However she found that the doctor dispatched was a cardiologist with no experience in obstetrics and gynaecology. The doctor also told her that he was only allowed to give general advice and could not write prescriptions for pharmaceuticals - only minor medications and supplements. It seems the DiDi Doctor staff are on secondment from private hospitals, but they do not have authority to practice medicine beyond their registered place of work. Users also questioned the calibre of he doctors involved, saying that good doctors were already in high demand, seeing 30+ patients in a morning - why would they spend a day driving round seeing only four or five patients. Users also questioned the business model, saying they would pay about 200-300 yuan to see a doctor in a public hospital - how much will DiDi Doctor charge when the service is beyond the test stage?

Universal health insurance comes one step closer - but who's paying?

by MICHAEL WOODHEAD
The big healthcare news from China this week is that a health insurance safety net for serious illness is being extended nationally. This means that if all goes to plan, poor people who develop catastrophic diseases such as cancer should not be left destitute by medical bills for care. Pilot programs that have been running at provincial level will now be extended to all provinces, according to an announcement by the State Council on July 22.
This will be good news for the many sad and desperate Chinese families who face financial ruin because of medical bills - or who are simply unable to pay and have to watch their loved ones die of treatable diseases. Some of them resort to all kinds of bizarre publicity stunts and begging methods to try raise the money to pay the medical bills. I have recently before about a girl who offered herself as a bride to any man who would pay her brother's medical bills.

According to the China Daily (hardly the most reliable of outlets), the meeting chaired by Premier Li Keqiang, cover for major illnesses will "cover all the subscribers to the urban and rural resident basic medical insurance as of the end of 2015", with full implementation in all 6800 public hospital in China by 2017.

A spokesman for the council said that there were 700 million impoverished people in China, of whom about 10 million are suffering from a chronic disease or major illness.The scheme will cover 50% of expenses initially, but this will be increased over time.

According to state media, the funding for the scheme will come from existing insurance accounts and therefore "will not be a financial burden to the beneficiaries". However, it also slipped in the detail that the safety net scheme will be run by commercial insurance agencies chosen by the government through bidding, with limits of 2-5% on profit margins.

"Introducing the third-party commercial insurance as operators will bring a better inspection performance to control medical fees and prevent waste or ill-designed fees" a government spokesman said.

China's commercial insurance companies are keen to get into the lucrative business of providing private health insurance. However, reading between the lines, it looks like the government has told them that covering the safety net for the impoverished will be a condition of their getting access to this market.

As China Daily, puts it:

Wu Ming, a professor of public health at Peking University, said many insurance companies may compete for the business despite lower profit margins, since it can bring many potential benefits.
"Participation in the program can pave the way for the insurers to enter further into the medical care sector in the future," she said.

However, as the more reliable Caixin magazine reports, commercial insurance companies are worried about the financial implications of taking on serious health insurance policies. The various pilot projects run in places such as Jiangsu and Zhejiang have shown the potential for major cost blowouts for uncapped schemes, and also problems with defining which illnesses are covered and who should pay for what. In some cases local governments, which administer (and fund) health insurance schemes tried to unload all their difficult patients onto the safety net. Or as they told Caixin magazine: "all the risk, none of the power, no voice".

The commercial companies also fear that they will be required to take on patients only after they have gone through the regular health insurance system over which they have not control. They believe that if they have a full package of insurance they would be able to control costs (and potentially prevent patients from developing serious illness) rather than just picking up the pieces.

At the State Council meeting chaired by Premier Li Keqiang, the government said it would be keeping a close watch on the safety net scheme and conducting many checks and inspections to ensure there was no abuse of the scheme.

What are hospitals like in China? (Answer: congested)

by MICHAEL WOODHEAD
Another week and another series of brutal attacks on hospital staff in China. This week it was the turn of an unfortunate female neurologist in Huizhou, Guangdong, who had her hand almost severed when she hacked with a machete by a disgruntled male patient. The man said he was unhappy with his treatment and attacked without warning when the doctor was on her ward rounds.

The authorities have made the usual responses - they have arrested the offender and tightened up security at the hospital. Tributes and donations have poured in from citizens sympathetic to the plight of the injured doctor. A petition against violence in healthcare has garnered half a million signatures from doctors - and the Guangdong health department has ordered that all medical institutions have a police office installed and manned around the clock.

The attack was one of 12 high profile violent incidents against health staff that occurred last week in China - including the smashing up of the 301 PLA Hospital in Beijing. What is the underlying reason for these attacks? One of the main factors often mentioned is that China's hospitals are simply overloaded and cannot offer adequate care to all patients - who then become angry and violent.

Is this because China's health system is underfunded or inefficient? Some interesting answers on the real situation about China's congested hospitals emerged this week in a lengthy paper in the academic journal Health Policy and Planning. It's worth reading if you want to know the background to China hospital system and how it got into the mess it's now in.

The authors paint a much more nuanced picture of China's hospital system than the usual overcrowded/underfunded/profit-seeking complaints. First of all they bust some myths. For a start, China's healthcare system is not massively underfunded by international standards - but it is  unevenly funded, with most resources devoted to city hospitals.

Also, China's hospital system is not uniformly overloaded - only the tertiary (highest level) hospitals are. The lower-level hospitals at county and township level are often underused and deserted because patients flock to what they perceive as the top quality care available at tertiary hospitals in cities.

The authors explain that this has come about for two reasons. Firstly, when China's hospitals were reformed by Deng Xiaoping, the high level city hospitals got a lot more investment and incentives than the township and country hospitals. This created a vicious circle because the large hospitals were able to invest in better equipment, and attract more patients. better staff and thus earned more 'business' (and income) while the county hospitals lost out.

However, the high level hospitals had two problems - they invested in infrastructure rather than staff, creating a shortage and misallocation of skills at the tertiary hospitals, where many staff are wasted dealing with minor illness.

Secondly, the tertiary hospital were bound by tight regulations on prices for essential drugs and medical services.  To overcome this, they invested in many unofficial services (eg cosmetic surgery, fertility clinics etc), which diverted resources away from frontline care. The restrictions on prices meant that hospitals had to overservice to gain more revenue - but it also meant that patients had no 'price signal' to seek care from local hospitals. They could get good care  at the tertiary hospital for the same price - even if it meant facing overcrowding and rushed consultations.

This, then, is the current situation in China's hospitals - an imbalanced system in which all patients flock to the short-staffed higher level hospitals, creating congestion and strife. The article by Dr Sun Zesheng and colleagues at the Zhejiang University of Science and Technology, Hangzhou, offers a simple solution: deregulate prices. They say that tertiary hospitals should charge a premium for their services, and patients should be encouraged to seek less expensive alternatives for non-urgent care at local hospitals and clinics. However, they also warn that the government must invest in better equipment and medical staff resources at lower level hospitals.

Until that happens, the big city hospitals will remain congested - and the pressure (and attacks) on staff will persist.

China's universal health insurance? Well, that depends what province you live in

by MICHAEL WOODHEAD
China's government now claims that something like 90% of the population are covered by health insurance. It's a statistic that's repeated by people who should know better - including the editor of the Lancet.
In reality, the level and breadth of health insurance varies significantly between different provinces. Some have high rates of coverage, some have high rates of investment in their health funds. Some have both, some neither. An interesting analysis in Caixin by Yang Mingyu shows why the patterns of health insurance have emerged.

[Health insurance coverage (left) and investment per person (right) by province]

He divides the provinces into four groups, characterised by their health insurance profile.
Some he describes as ideal, with high rates of cover (80-90%) and investment (100-1800 yuan per person). These tend to be the affluent eastern coast provinces of Guangdong, Zhejiang, Jiangsu. A second group, typified by Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, (and weirdly, Tibet) have high rates of investment in their health insurance systems, but coverage isn't so great - sometimes as low as 60%. The third kind of insurance pattern is the 'cover' province: Sichuan, Guangxi, Chongqing, which have high rates of insurance cover but only modest investment in them. And finally we have the poor relations - the low cover and low investment provinces such as Heilongjiang, Jilin, Liaoning.

Yang Mingyu says the  patterns are explained by a combination of economic strength, internal migration and the government's policy to maintain social stability. Investment in healthcare is seen as a major way of preserving social stability. Therefore, the government has invested heavily in health insurance in some of the  provinces where there have been large inflows of migrant labour. Conversely, some of the poorer provinces  have a left behind population of mostly elderly and children with high healthcare requirements but little capacity to contribute to healthcare costs. The government has promoted wider membership of health funds in these areas to reap premiums needed to support the health infrastructure.

However, there have been some 'backward' conservative provinces with few financial resources and also little investment in the health funds.

The article concludes by saying that some provinces need to be encouraged to reform their health insurance systems and provide more cover or investment to suit local needs, even if the local circumstances do not favour it.

Healthcare reform in China - The Five Reforms and why they will fail

by MICHAEL WOODHEAD

As part of its latest round of healthcare reforms the Chinese government has released  a handy guide to the five top things it is doing to overhaul the creaky hospital system. The snappily titled "Guiding Opinions on Pilot Comprehensive Reform of Urban Public Hospitals" is really just a wish list for what the government would like to  see happening in the public hospital system.

Bear in mind that in China a "Public Hospital" is not  a public hospital as we would understand it in Britain or Europe. It's not a government-funded hospital that provides universal care. No, it's a state owned enterprise that runs a user-pays health institution. No money, no treatment. It's true that most people have some kind of government-subsidised health insurance that may cover some of their medical bills, but here again the public hospitals have a monopoly on that income - until this year private hospitals were not eligible for medical insurance rebates.

Anyway, all that is changing with the new Five Reforms:

1. Management Reform

The government says hospitals must adopt a more independent and accountable management system - recruiting outside experts and taking on board evaluation and performance review systems. They must start to subject themselves to outside scrutiny from consumer and industry groups and  - here's the killer - be transparent with their data. In other words, reveal their costings (insurance companies will love this) and their activities. A big ask. Expect massive resistance.

2. Revenue Reform

Hospital must stop relying on profits from sales of drugs and medical devices for their revenue. At the moment hospitals get 40-60% of their revenue from markups on drugs, medical equipment etc, and only a small proportion from medical fees and government subsidies. The central government wants to reverse that, and is going to ban drug commissions. To make up the lost revenue the hospitals must increase medical fees. Patients won't like that. There have already been riots in pilot trial sites in Sichuan by kidney dialysis patients who saw their cost of treatment go up 200%. The local government backed down.

3. Performance Reform

Hospitals must ditch the current system that forces doctors to overservice in order to achieve their bonuses. They must ditch the contracts that link doctor's remuneration to prescribing and procedure numbers, and replace it with a performance system based on clinical outcomes, service and efficiency.

4. Gatekeeper Reform

The government wants a primary care gatekeeper system and says tertiary hospital must stop being the One Stop Shop/First Port of Call for all and sundry.  Medical insurance policies are to be changed to force patients to attend local community clinics for minor illness and then be referred to local hospitals before going to a major tertiary hospital. The  major city hospitals will be reserved for more advanced and complex care patients. They must stop offering outpatient care for minor illnesses. This will take some getting used to because at the moment all Chinese make a beeline for 'the best hospital' as soon as they have a cough or cold.

5. Private Interest Reform

State-owned hospitals must be opened up to outside private business interests - the so-called 'social capital'. Private companies must be allowed to take on major roles within hospitals, along with insurance companies, and other medical foundations. Most importantly, they must have access to health information data.

The long and short of this guidance is that the closed and tightly-controlled monopoly situation for state owned hospitals must be bust open. At the moment, state-owned hospitals are the empires for local government bureaucrat-business chiefs. They jealously guard their business and their revenue stream - which is patients and the drugs and treatment they receive.

In an interesting opinion article in Caixin this week, Tsinghua University health economist Li Jiangge says that previous efforts to reform the hospital have failed because they simply have too much power and have too much to lose. He cites the example of government programs to provide  affordable treatment for cataracts. Although the central government provided generous funding to set up cataract treatment programs, most local governments blocked these projects in their areas because they would lose the lucrative income from doing the operations in their own hospitals. In other words - hospitals will block anything they see as competition or which undermines their own services. Likewise with kidney dialysis: China has 3 million people with renal failure needing dialysis, but only 400,000 get dialysis. The remainder go untreated and have early death because public hospitals will not allow private operators to enter this area and compete with them.

As Li Jiangge says, private investors and public hospital managers are "strange bedfellows" with conflicting and competing interests, who cannot be expected to co-operate. The few attempts at encouraging private industry to go into partnership wit public hospitals have not been a great success, he says.

Li Jiangge says private hospitals will only flourish when they are independent of the public system and have access to the same advantages such as medical insurance rebates and access to health data. Furthermore, he says private hospital development has been held back by lots of regulations that make them subject to local government control - including many "not-for-profit" rules. He says private companies should be allowed to do what they do best - make profits and take them away. The role of government should be to focus on "public health" matters such as disease control, vaccination and basic health services, he argues.

China's government take the biggest step towards private healthcare

by MICHAEL WOODHEAD

This month China's State Council has announced its biggest ever policy move towards developing a private healthcare system in China: it has made private hospitals eligible for reimbursement under the national health insurance coverage plans. In other words, private hospitals can now compete for China's equivalent of 'Medicare' rebates. Since most urban Chinese are covered by some kind of national health insurance policy, this is huge.

The State Council announced a raft of other measures that will make it easier for private hospitals to compete against the giant and powerful public hospitals. The government has announced tax breaks for private hospitals and abolished a lot of regulatory barriers such as rules on bed numbers. It has also said that nonprofit private medical institutions should get subsidies from the government.

These changes are a signal of a major change in China's government health reforms. Up till now, the government has made incremental changes to try foster the development of private hospitals (or "private capital invested medical institutions" as the cosmetic-Marxist state media still refer to them).

The government has tried to encourage doctors to work outside the public system by abolishing many of the restrictions on 'moonlighting'. It has eased the rules on foreign companies investing in private hospitals. It has abolished the pharmaceutical profit-skimming by public hospitals by stipulating a no-commission policy on drug sales.

However, none of this has been enough. The small reforms haven't worked because the powerful State-Owned Enterprise hospitals have been the elephant in the room of China's healthcare system. They control the income (from health insurance and out of pocket payments), they control the real estate, the equipment ($2 million for an MRI machine anyone?) and the workforce - and they also control the medical training. It's also not too obvious to state that the big public hospitals are run by the local government - who make the rules.

The central government has finally woken up to the fact that the only way to truly reform the healthcare system is to undermine it. The new deregulation steps will divert revenue from the public hospitals and give investors the belief that there is a genuine business case for private hospitals to succeed in a tough market.

Until now, the private hospital sector has been small, stymied and suspect. Official figures say that private hospitals account for about 10% of hospital beds - and patients, with most private hospitals being small specialist clinics of limited influence. The small private hospitals have never had the capital or networking to compete in purchasing power with the big government funded hospitals - and hence have a reputation for having limited equipment, staffing and resources. Many of the privately operated clinics have a reputation for offering aggressively marketed but suspect services (fertility and impotence clinics, cosmetic surgery etc) and for overcharging.

In the Chinese media, analysts are saying the new deregulation changes will awaken investor interest in the private hospital sector - with specific interest coming from pharmaceutical companies. One example is Shanghai's Fosun Pharmaceuticals, which has a subsidiary "Hospital Medical Investment Management" company that has just signed a "framework agreement" to set up private hospital services in Yulin City

It remains to be seen whether the changes will help the National Health and Family Planning Commission (NHFPC) and Chinese government achieve its aim of doubling the number of private hospital beds from 10% of total to 20% by 2020.

The right and wrong way to do primary care: Shanghai vs Shenzhen

by MICHAEL WOODHEAD
Pilot programs in primary care have been carried out in two of China's largest and wealthiest cities since 2009: they used different models and it looks like Shanghai got it right and Shenzhen got it wrong. 

The basic difference between the two models of care was that Shanghai went with a more UK/European model of having independent general practitioner-owned centres that were publicly funded via a capitation model and which were based around multidisciplinary teams. Shenzhen, by contrast, used a more conservative approach based on clinics run by existing hospitals that installed GPs in rented premises and who were given only minimal funding, and thus they had to charge patients or make revenue from commission on drug sales.

In other words, the Shenzhen system was really just using primary care practitioners in the same failed model that currently operates in China's hospitals. GPs in Shenzhen felt underfunded and they had no support staff - and this inferior quality was noticed by patients. In an evaluation of 3421 citizens carried out by health researchers from Hong Kong, it was found that the perception of primary care quality among local residents improved in Shanghai since 2009, whereas it deteriorated in Shenzhen.

What were the factors that worked for Shanghai? According to the researchers, the Shanghai model was based on public-funded primary healthcare teams that included doctors, nurses and public health specialists. They tailored their care to local needs - offering programs for chronic diseases of the elderly such as diabetes and hypertension, and also for maternal and child health.

The Shanghai funding model was partially based on capitation - in other words, the clinics received about $20 a year per patient they enrolled. Enrolment with a community health centre was a key feature of the Shanghai model, with residents offered free care if they stuck with the same clinic rather than attend tertiary hospitals for care. The Shanghai GP centres were funded by local government and could provide services and prescriptions at no cost to local people.

In contrast, the Shenzhen clinics were set up and operated by hospitals, which ran them along the same lines as other hospital departments - namely with GPs having to derive their income from fees and drug sales. This meant that many patients had to pay upfront fees - especially as about 70% of the local populace are internal migrants and their fees are not reimbursable by their hometown-based health insurance policies.

It seems that Shenzhen's primary care clinics were Cinderella services - playing second fiddle to well-funded and high prestige hospital clinics. GPs were underpaid and poorly resourced compared to their hospital counterparts. No wonder patients perceived a lack of quality in their services.

The study authors make the obvious conclusion that the Shanghai model if the better one: "The quality of primary care improved in Shanghai but not in Shenzhen. This may be because, in Shanghai, beneficial long-term relationships between patients and general practitioners were supported by capitation payments and the provision of services tailored to local health priorities."

Source: WHO Bulletin

Drug sale reforms; Autistic children abused; Tibetan monks don't get hypertension; Guangzhou's first private clinic; Doctors stabbed in Fuzhou; Tax breaks for private health insurance

by MICHAEL WOODHEAD
The move to stop county-level hospitals from deriving their income from 15% markups on pharmaceuticals will severely dent their revenue stream and threaten services, health economists have warned. China has already trialled  drug commission bans in 300 county hospitals and now plans to extend the system to 1000 hospitals nationally, Caixin reports. However, the plan could leave hospitals short of funds and thus reduce the level of services and hurt the morale of medical workers,  academics and doctors say. The State Council has said local governments should help hospitals to make up for the lost income from drug sales. However,Wang Zhen, a research fellow at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said local governments were already strained financially and they don't have extra money for hospitals.Wang said that without government subsidies and other measures in place, scrapping the markup practice might wind up creating other problems because hospitals will find alternative ways to make money.

Children with autism in China face experience high rates of physical abuse from their parents and family members, a study from Henan shows. In a survey of 180 children with autism, Zhengzhou researchers found that 36% had recently experienced severe physical maltreatment such as slapping on the face, being beaten with objects or kicked. Less severe physical maltreatment such as being slapped, or shaken was experienced by 86% of autistic children.

Tibetan monks have low rates of hypertension, according to a study carried out in Gansu. The survey of 984 monks found that 19% had hypertension, compared to 34% of the local population. However, despite having low rates of high blood pressure, there were also low rates of awareness, treatment and control of hypertension among monks, the researchers found.

Encouraged by new government policy a surgical oncologist has opened Guangzhou's first major private clinic. The clinic set up by Dr Lin Feng will offer speedy diagnosis and high quality treatment by a well known surgeon previously practicing at the renowned 3rd Hospital of Guangzhou. The clinic charges about 2-3000 yuan fees, and offers high quality diagnosis and surgery without the long waits and rushed consultations of public hospitals, its operators say.

Two doctors at a Fuzhou hospital were stabbed in an attack by a 66-year old male patient, local media report. One male and one female doctor were seriously injured by the man armed with a 40cm knife who had been attending the Fuzhou hospital to have his haemorrhoids treated. A hospital spokesman said the man was unhappy with the treatment he received for his haemorrhoids and stabbed a female doctor in the hip. The male doctor who tried to restrain him was also stabbed in the arm.

Tax breaks are to be introduced for Chinese consumers who take out private health insurance, the government has announced. People who spend more than 2,400 yuan on commercial health insurance policies per year will now only pay individual taxes on income above 3,700 yuan per month, instead of 3,500 yuan, CCTV has reported. The move is part of a government campaign to encourage Chinese people to  purchase private health policies in addition to their standard government benefits.

Personal experience of the Chinese health system

An overseas Chinese friend of mine has just come back from China, where she returned to care for her dying father. Her experience of the Chinese health system was mostly positive, but her story reveals some of the reality behind the rhetoric of recent government pronouncements on reforms.
Her father was seriously ill with lung cancer and had only a few weeks to live. After the diagnosis, at an army-affiliated hospital, the doctors did not try to offer futile chemotherapy with expensive drugs, but just offered a poor but honest prognosis. There was no access to what we in the west would call palliative care. Instead, doctors recommended that he return home, to be cared for by family members. In some pain and discomfort, the father was provided with some analgesics, but no opioids.

After about a week, the father was in considerable pain and returned to the hospital for treatment. He lived for another 18 days, being given a mixture of analgesics and other drugs to ease his bowel problems. The cost of treatment was 18,000 yuan. As he had been a member of his employer's urban health insurance plan, the father (or rather his family) was able to claim back about 70% of the medical expenses. However, the hospital treatment did not include 'extras' such as meals, dressings and bed linen! The nurses provided most of the basic medical care but none of the ancillary care such as washing, feeding and chaging bed linen that nurses in western hospitals would do. Instead this was left to the family. As the family were not able to be on 24/7 carer duty they hired a 'kanghu' carer at a cost of 800 yuan per day, to do basic chores such as feeding and cleaning the patient.

The family were satisfied with the overall level of medical care provided by the hospital, though they found it somewhat basic until they used their guanxi to find a better team of doctors and nurses. This was done because they knew someone who knew one of the senior doctors at the hospital.No money changed hands, but the father benefited form having more attention paid to his care by the more senior medical practitioner in the hospitals. After the father passed away, the family presented hongbao containing about 200 yuan to each of the 20 medical team who cared for him. This was done to maintain face and  confirm the good guangxi that was used to obtain better care for the father.
Funeral arrangements were made for the father via the hospital contacts, who no doubt gained some financial advantage from their referral.

The family believed their father received good care that was personal and respectful - but no doubt because they were able to use their connections in what was essentially a small city where everybody knew everybody.

Hypertension treatment outdated; Infants hit by Group B Streptococcal infections; Liver disease brings ruinously medical bills; Caesarean sections the norm; Li Keqiang unhappy with pace of health reforms

by MICHAEL WOODHEAD
Treatment of high blood pressure in China is quite backward because it is exactly that - treatment of just the raised blood pressure, with no attention to other cardiovascular risk factors. Cardiologists now emphasise that it is essential to treat a person's overall cardiovascular risk, not just focus on single risk factors such as blood pressure. But a study carried out in 274 hypertensive patients in Zhejiang found that  found that 28% were still smoking, 39% drank regularly and only 21% exercised frequently. The average salt intake per day was above the national recommended level of 6g. The study also found that most patients were taking only one drug for high blood pressure, which was inadequate to control their blood pressure. Many were taking 'herbal' medicines that actually contained out of date and dangerous western antihypertensives such as reserpine. As the authors conclude: "The study revealed outdated and inadequate treatment and health education for hypertensive patients, especially for those who have high risk scores for CVD. There is a need to review the community-based guidelines for hypertension management."

In Shenzhen, researchers at the Children's Hospital have shown that invasive group B streptococcal infection is an important pathogen in infants under 90 days old, resulting in in high mortality and neurological sequelae. The streptococcal infection strains showed strong resistance to clindamycin and erythromycin.

Liver disease is an expensive condition that often sees families facing ruinous medical bills in China. A study carried out at a Kunming hospital found that the average yearly cost of medical treatment for hepatitis B was 19,496 RMB, while patients with cirrhosis faced bills of up to 46,061 RMB. While public medical insurance helped pay for some of the costs, catastrophic health expenditure occurred for families affected by all these illnesses.

China's high rate of caesarean sections will be difficult to bring down to more healthy levels, according to researchers. In a  survey of a112,138 women they found the cesarean delivery rate was 55% and as high as 66% in some regions. Two thirds of the cesarean deliveries were scheduled and performed before labour  and about 40%%  were performed without any recognised medical indications. About 57% of the caesareans were done on request of the mother.

Meanwhile, the progress of health reform is obviously too slow for the Premier Li Keqiang. This month he has called for more medical reform measures to overcome 'difficulties' in the healthcare system. In written instructions he identified problems areas that needed attention, such as hospitals should be prevented from being "financed by drug sales" He also said that more effort should be given to reform of county-level hospitals and more serious diseases needed to be covered by medical insurance. His orders came after reform measures were introduced across all county-level hospitals and are now being piloted in 100 city-level hospitals.

Alibaba Health, iKang, Online consultations, Tobacco advertising ban, Antibiotics in food, HIV discrimination

by MICHAEL WOODHEAD

Hello and welcome to another week of China Healthcare. As China makes headlines around the world for its slowing economy, few have remarked that China's entrepreneurs are taking a different and more rosy view by re-focusing on healthcare. This week the Alibaba internet billionaire Jack Ma has issued a $2.5 billion vote of confidence in the prospect for online pharmacy in China by transferring his pharmacy e-commerce section to Alibaba Health ("Ali Jiankan" or alijk.com).  According to the WSJ, "Alibaba said the deal would position it to sell prescription pharmaceuticals should China’s reforms allow retailers to move in that direction".

At the same time, Forbes has profiled another internet millionaire who has made his fortune by turning to health. Zhang Ligang made his first fortune by founding the travel booking site e-Long, but he is more famous for building a chain of private clinics under the banner iKang. And if China really does shift to a more private healthcare system, companies like iKang should be at the forefront of the wave.

The NHFPC has banned online medical diagnosis. In a statement this week the health ministry said medical consultations cannot be conducted online as there have been too many cases of unqualified people offering medical advice, purporting to be experts. The ban does not seem to apply to accredited hospitals that have approved programs. What this means for online doctor apps such as Spring Rain (www.chunyuyisheng.com) remains to be seen.

Children in China are exposed to a wide variety of antibiotics in food, which may promote resistance. A study in Shanghai that tested the urine of more than a 1000 children aged between 8 and 11 years of age found that as most had traces of at least one antibiotic and many had several antibiotics in their system.  Altogether 18 different antibiotics were found in the urine of Shanghai children, reflecting the high levels of antibiotics used in food production in China. This was confirmed by another report out this week which noted that the Chinese food and livestock industries use 100,000 tons of antibiotics  a year to promote growth in animals reared for their meat.

A total ban on tobacco advertising n China has been urged by the WHO. The head of the China office of WHO said China had a treaty obligation to phase out tobacco advertising, and should start to do so at retail points of sale. However, the powerful state-owned tobacco industry might baulk at that. The relative power of the health and tobacco industry was shown this week when health minister Li Bin noted that new graduates could earn twice as much in the tobacco industry compared to medical graduates working in hospitals. She made the point that the basic salary for a university graduate working in the tobacco industry was 4571 yuan a month compared to only 2100 yuan a month for a junior doctor. Li Bin said there was a need to learn from Adam Smith and pay the market rate for medical graduates - and this would mean patients being prepared to pay higher medical fees.

And finally the question arises of whether anti-HIV discrimination still exists in the China's hospitals. A patient at the Sichuan University Huaxi Hospital says he was refused surgery when doctors discovered his HIV positive status. The man said he had been scheduled to have surgery for haemangioma but it was cancelled and he was told that he would instead be kept 'under observation' instead. The hospital rejected the discrimination claim, saying that it was standard practice to keep patients under observation before going ahead with surgery for this condition.