Inhale the future, exhale the past
For China’s chronically underpaid physicians (the average starting salary for a junior physician was $730 a month in 2018), the best route is to avoid becoming a low-paid general practitioner, especially in the countryside, and opt for a career as a higher paid specialist. And if that career choice doesn’t work, pharmaceutical company kickbacks commonly do. And if kickbacks don’t suffice, many doctors simply accept “red envelopes” of cash to ensure basic services are rendered correctly.
These well-known practices deepen patient mistrust and cynicism, and have led to an epidemic of patient violence against Chinese doctors and nurses, including an attack on an opthamologist last week in Beijing (the weapon was a “vegetable chopper”). As far back as 2008, 48% of Chinese hospitals reported violent attacks against health workers. In a recent survey of general practitioners in Hubei Province, the source of the new coronavirus, 18.9% of respondents reported exposure to physical workplace violence in the preceding year.
Low pay, low status and the threat of violence has predictably depressed interest in the caring professions. In 2018, China had two doctors per 1,000 inhabitants, compared with 2.6 in the United States, 2.8 in Canada, and a world-beating 5.2 in Austria. More alarming, the profession is aging. […]
For now, China can treat Wuhan’s shortage of doctors as a health crisis and mobilize qualified personnel from across China to work in the city. Indeed, 6,000 medical workers from across China have either arrived in the Wuhan area or will soon, and they will alleviate much of the pressure building up in hospital corridors.
oil on painting { Pablo Picasso, Buste de Femme (Dora Maar), 1938 }
