After 12 years of insufficient training and an unfriendly working environment, China is facing a critical shortage of pediatricians. With the launch of the new two-child policy, China expects to see a remarkable increase in births, which could pose a bigger challenge for China's medical system in filling pediatrician vacancies.
Ningning is 11-months old, and has some problems with her tongue. Because of the limited number of pediatricians, her mother, Xu Zhe, waited for a long time for this appointment.
Like Ningning, many kids in China are suffering from the pediatrician shortage. According to China's National Planning and Family Commission, there is less than one pediatrician for every two-thousand kids in China. But in the US, the same number of kids share three doctors. China now has 220-million children under 14 years old. If the country wants to match the US ratio, it will need another 200,000 pediatricians. And as China has just replaced its one-child policy with the two-child policy, the expected dramatic increase in births will make the pediatrician shortage even more severe.
China stopped offering pediatrics as an undergraduate major in 1999, which cut off a stable source of medics for the specialist field. Also, unlike in the US and other countries, doctors' income in China is just close to an ordinary white-collar worker. They do not belong to a high-income group. Compared with doctors in other departments, pediatricians in China work under higher stress and a heavier work-load.
As children's illnesses gets worse fast, the pediatricians need to handle more emergency cases, which leaves them overloaded.
So, many hospitals have a hard time in recruiting and keeping pediatricians. Some of them even have to shut down their pediatric department.
Chinese government has just authorized a two-child policy in China. The central government says it's determined to build a stronger team of pediatricians to handle the anticipated increase in births in China by increasing doctors' incomes and improving the training for the medical staff that works in pediatrics.
Jiang believes that, rather than cultivating enough pediatricians, allocating enough medical resources is a more efficient way to fix the problem.
"You need to use the best people in the most effective way. Some of the most advanced experts still have to spend a lot of time in curing patients with simple illnesses, such as cold and fever, while those patients with complex illnesses who are desperate to see the expert will have difficulty in seeing the right doctor. It's a big waste," Jiang said.
Xu says she hopes in the future she doesn't have to wait for so long for such a brief appointment.
