health care reform

http://www.themalaysianinsider.com/features/article/rural-skills-gap-stumps-chinas-health-care-plans/

The article deals on how China's new prosperity brings new health care reforms but also on the obstacles to those reforms. The health care reform plans on building new clinics, buy more medical equipment and hope to decrease the price of medicines. But the worry concerning the success of those reform lays in the different skills needed; on one hand to use the different equipments, on the other hand to administer the new drugs.

This article rung a bell for me. I was lucky to go on a janterm in Yunnan, China. The theme of the janterm was Traditional Chinese medicine and how it is used with Western medicine. Yunnan is mostly rural. One of the big issue raised was the difference city-countryside in the number of doctors available per habitant. There are more doctors in the cities and on the other hand, medical facilities are rare in remote areas. Add to that, in the countryside the doctors don't always have a proper training; some of them learned through their fathers, some of them learned by watching other doctors..etc Those different factors lead to a very critical situation healthwise in the chinese countryside. An other subject that I wish to touch in later post are the "barefoot doctors" that appeared under Mao, and the campaigns of prevention that, at that time, lead to almost eliminate some disease such as the plague and the cholera. .