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A new prescription

By Roberta Lipson (China Daily)
Updated: 2008-10-29 10:03

My days in hospital

In 1985 I had an opportunity to experience the Chinese healthcare system from the inside, when I contracted type-A hepatitis. A doctor friend, who had noticed that my skin had begun to turn yellow, plucked me from my hotel room. As the daughter of a high-level military officer, she dared to risk more personal contact than most locals would with foreigners at the time. When she called to check on me I was barely conscious, and she had me whisked off to the officers' ward of the army's infectious diseases hospital.

At that time the hospital was still sparsely equipped technologically, but during the month for which I was restricted to the isolation ward, I learned how unbelievably caring the doctors and the nurses were.

Although I knew I was getting special treatment - because I was a foreigner, because I was a trusted supplier to the army's healthcare system, because I was brought in by the general's daughter and because I was in a special officers' ward - the concern that I was shown could not have been invented for me.

Although the doctors of that time and even today are sometimes greatly lacking in tools and the hospital environments are less than ideal, there are many dedicated and devoted individuals who have soldiered through very difficult periods but have never lost their commitment to healing or their sense of caring.

In 1989, I was once again inside a Chinese hospital, but this time as a patient advocate rather than as a supplier or consultant. A good friend (a young official at a Chinese foreign trade corporation) was pregnant. Due to the severe overcrowding of Chinese hospitals at the time, everyone needed all the help they could get to secure a bed in a top-rated hospital and, given our relationships, this was something I was able to help with at the obstetrics hospital in Beijing.

However, because she lived far from the hospital and we lived close, she came to stay at our house as her due date approached. When her labor started in earnest, my fianc and I drove her to the hospital. What then ensued was what I can only describe as a humiliating experience both for my friend and her husband.

It was 6 pm when we arrived at the hospital and the dusty, smoky haze of a typical Beijing winter sunset gave way to the dim and dreary hallway of the hospital, already abandoned by the daytime workers and the hoards of clinic patients one would have seen just a few hours earlier.

As my friend entered the intake exam room the nurses, who a minute earlier we could hear cheerily chatting with each other, became suddenly and completely absorbed in some piece of paper on their desks, and it took several knocks on the open door, a number of throat clearings and finally the surprise of me, a foreigner, tapping on a shoulder to get their attention.

Despite the attention aroused by the unusual presence of a foreigner, the women clearly were perturbed to have been pulled away from their chat and, after begrudgingly asking about the contractions, which were then steady at five-minute intervals, sent us off and told us to come back when the contractions were three minutes apart.

After walking around the block with our mom-to-be for about an hour, the "angel" of mercy who turned us away at the beginning reluctantly agreed to admit my friend, who at that time was so overwhelmed by the pain of labor, she could not walk very far without stopping to lean on a wall or on her husband until the contraction passed.

Despite this state of affairs, she was asked to climb the stairs to the third-floor delivery rooms (the elevator being reserved for other uses) while carrying her own belongings, including her towel and washbowl, which she knew to bring from home. Neither her husband nor I was allowed to accompany her. We were dispatched to wait in a lightless corridor with about five or six other expectant young fathers.

During our wait, those who were not pacing the corridor and smoking endless cigarettes were sitting on the floor for lack of seating and smoking endless cigarettes, as they waited long hours with no word. I can only suppose that the nurses were so busy that they could not be bothered to come and deliver news to these anxious young men.

At 3 am I took matters into my own hands and ventured up to the delivery floor, where I was roundly criticized by the head nurse and sent back to wait until a collective news bulletin came at 6 am, which included the information that our friend had delivered a healthy baby boy.

Two years later, I was to deliver my own child at the Boca Raton Community Hospital in Florida. The contrast between these two experiences convinced me to move forward with an idea that I had been toying with for a while.

Need for change

There was more that needed to be changed in China's hospitals than just the updating of the hardware and technology. There were serious issues of insufficient and misdirected investment, which I could not solve on a large scale, but there were also big improvements that could be made by upgrading the management, service model and the philosophy that surrounded the delivery of patient care.

I could think of no better way to encourage change in this area than to model it, and at the same time provide a service to the growing international community who, like my small but growing family, still traveled out of China for any kind of serious healthcare need.

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