FORGET the calls by many Chinese patients for more honest, better-qualified doctors. What Shenyang's 27 public hospitals really need, officials have decided, is police officers.
And not just at the entrance, but as deputy administrators. The goal: to keep disgruntled patients and their relatives from attacking the doctors.
Officials in this north-eastern industrial city of nearly eight million people have a point. Chinese hospitals are dangerous places to work. In 2006, the last year the Health Ministry published statistics on hospital violence, attacks by patients or their relatives injured more than 5,500 medical workers.
"The police should have a permanent base here," said a neurosurgeon at Shengjing Hospital. "I always feel this element of danger."
In June alone, a doctor was stabbed to death in Shandong Province by the son of a patient who had died of liver cancer.
Three doctors were severely burned in Shanxi Province when a patient set fire to a hospital office. A paediatrician in Fujian Province was also injured after leaping out a fifth-floor window to escape angry relatives of a newborn who had died under his care.
Over the past year, families of deceased patients have forced doctors to don mourning clothes as a sign of atonement for poor care, and organised protests to bar hospital entrances. Four years ago, 2,000 people rioted at a hospital after reports that a three-year-old boy was refused treatment because his grandfather could not pay £50 in upfront fees. The child died.
Doctors and nurses say the strains in the relations between them and patients' relatives are often the result of unrealistic expectations by poor families who, having travelled far and exhausted their savings on care, expect medical miracles.
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