[Photo/VCG]

Because of China’s medical reform during the past four decades, a deep-rooted medical mechanism in which doctors’ salaries were tied to the medicines they prescribed finally ended on April 8, 2017.

It was replaced by a more reasonable medical services price system and a more scientific public hospital management system.

Fang Laiying, former director of the Beijing Municipal Health Commission, has a clear memory of the day when over 3,600 public hospitals in Beijing officially ran the new system at the same time.

The previous medical funding system had the shortcoming of making people’s health expenditures higher than they should have been, although in the 1950s it supported self-financing by public hospitals at a time when China’s government lacked the funds to subsidize them.

The reform scraps drug price markups and cancels fees forregistration, consultation of treatments, and sets medical service fees to ensure patients’ financial burdens will not be heavier than before.

The outpatient and emergency services of Beijing’s tertiary hospitals have been down by 10 percent, and community health services up 14 percent one year later.

The “up" and "down” benefit the public and ensures hospitals at all levels have a healthy development.

“We are beneficiaries of the reform and also members engaging in it. The reform is always on the way and lets us create the next 40 years together,” said Fang.

Peking Union Medical College Hospital (PUMCH), one of best-known public hospitals in China, absorbs patients from around the country, which is a huge pressure on the nationally authoritative institute and Zhao Peiyu, president of the hospital. He is used to transforming the pressure into stimulation for his work.

Patients’ hopes are down to earth and they just want to get treatment and access to hospital beds, said Zhao. Therefore he leads the hospital to develop on the basis of better servicing patients and has come up with a new concept of treating them as family members to improve their satisfaction with PUMCH as well as improve their well-being.

Inheriting the PUMCH spirit is the most precious resource for the hospital, keeping its great tradition alive in modern times.

PUMCH pays a lot of attention to establishing and updating its management institution system to ensure that it runs in a regular and smooth way.

Most of China’s medical workers say that the PUMCH is like a melting pot, a processing plant or a big school in which the PUMCH spirit will influence all and all in turn will gradually become its inheritor.

The hundred-year hospital has always put people first and been a place for all patients, said Zhao as he remembers the past four decades.

China’s medical reform has been adjusting in the 40 years’ reform and opening-up but its basic core that guarantees people’s benefits never changed.

The new round of medical reform has already gone through 10 years. Connecting and coordinating the reforms of medical services, medical insurance and medical supplies is the reform’s key point. Classification of diagnoses and treatment, modern hospital management, full coverage of medical insurance and medicine supply and guarantees as well as comprehensive supervision and control are five areas of reform in the near future.

Although the words related to medical reform may not be familiar to the public, they are always meant to ensure that the public enjoys better health services.