Hospital Bed Crisis for Chinese

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Summary:



Chinese hospital shortages have reached critical heights in recent years, and citizens there are beginning to feel the adverse affects of this phenomenon. The reputed Beijing Children's Hospital, which is designed to treat 4,000 patients at one time, is starting to see such staggering numbers as 7,000 new patients daily. Similarly, the Capital Institute for Pediatrics is seeing more than a 10% increase in the number of patients it sees annually, creating a total of about 1.7 million patients in 2010, as compared to 800,000 in the previous year. The overcrowded hospitals are becoming great challenges for hospital staff members. Forty guards must work night and day to make sure that the swarms of people do not start acting violently, and nurses administer more than 2.5 times the amount of IV's than is called for on average. Doctors are beginning to feel the adverse affects, as they must see at least 100 patients per day, which is taking its toll on the most integral part of the medical system. Furthermore, pediatric hospitals and care are beginning to wane because they provide a very small percentage of a hospital's revenue, and get caught up in more moral and ethical issues than other hospital branches. The Chinese continue to battle the poor health care system, and hope they don't need to feel its effects.



Significance:



This article ties in strongly with the idea of a Communist, and very "strong," type of government. Hospitals quite simply cannot take care of all the people that need medical attention, and focus only on profit margins rather than the care of the needy. Since most hospitals in China are state-run, they feel no urge to be competitive due to a severe lack of alternative facilities or treatment. This also speaks to how large the disparity between the urban population and the rural population in terms of wealth, technology, and medical care, is. This is a major cleavage, and it is obviously evident in the access to medical treatment in China because the article mentions how rural families must travel all the way to the cities in order to get decent medical care. One more idea that is tied into this article is urbanization. In China, obviously, most services and economic facets are located centrally, and are not accessible to the rural population.