[Photo/VCG]

For the past 40 years, Chinese people have been well served by doctors at all levels, including barefoot doctors, rural doctors and family doctors.

Forty-five years may equals the majority of the life of an ordinary person. Li Chunhua, a village doctor in Beihong village, Beiji township, Mohe county, Heilongjiang province, has spent 45 years as a rural doctor, regardless of all kinds of job opportunities. In those 45 years she has provided more than 20,000 free medical visits, and traveled over 30,000 kilometers.

The Beihong village where Li lives is the most remote mountain village in Mohe county. The village has only one road connected to the outside, and is 115 kilometers away from the county seat and 125 kilometers away from Beiji town. Li is the only doctor in the village serving 152 villagers. 

 “Now if the villagers suffer minor illness, we can cure them in the village with hundreds of medicines; if there is an emergency, an ambulance of a county-level hospital will come just with a phone call, ” Li said, looking back over the past 45 years. 

Like Li, Yan Zheng, a team leader of the general practitioner group of the community health service center in Pengpu township, Jing'an district, Shanghai, has stuck to his post for 25 years, during which he has kept copies of 51 house keys entrusted to him by the community’s residents.

In 1999, Mrs Yu and her husband, residents in the community, were seriously ill and needed care. So in addition to treating them, Yan also brought the medicines to their house, and helped them clean their body and change their clothes. One day, Mrs Yu's husband handed out the key of his house to Yan, the first key he had received. Afterwards, with the name of the “key doctor” widely known in the community, more and more patients visited Yan for treatment, and gave their keys to him.

"I hope that every community resident can own a trusted family doctor, and each family doctor can become a friend and a member of families in the community," Yan said.

People’s health can’t be guaranteed without the diligence of medical worker at basic levels.