Respect is enough for doctor who has charged 1 yuan for 36 years
Print Edition
How valuable is a yuan (14 US cents) in today鈥檚 China? Perhaps half a bottle of water, one-tenth of a McDonald鈥檚 cheeseburger, or one-hundredth of a stylish haircut in downtown Beijing.
But at a clinic in east China鈥檚 Zhejiang Province, it is the medical bill for everything from a consultation to a transfusion.
For the past five decades, Dr Wu Guangchao has been the sole physician, nurse, acupuncturist and accountant of the clinic in Meitang Village. He is one of the nearly 1 million grassroots medical practitioners in China鈥檚 vast countryside known as 鈥渧illage doctors.鈥
For 36 years, denying annual inflation, he has maintained the 1-yuan service.
Wu uses a rusty coin box to collect fees.
鈥淭he practice of medicine is doing good work,鈥 said the 73-year-old. 鈥淩espect and trust from the fellow villagers are what I value most.鈥
A typical day for Wu starts around 6am when the elderly, now the main residents of the village, start to visit. Any emergency calls at night pull Wu out of bed. 鈥淭he village has about 600 people, and I remember every patient鈥檚 condition and medical history,鈥 Wu said.
Decades of hard work and dedication have made him one of the most esteemed figures in the village. When he was hospitalized after a bicycle accident, more than 100 villagers visited him.
In 1983, Wu鈥檚 clinic started to receive subsidies from the government, which were significantly increased in 2011.
But the 4,500 yuan he now gets in a monthly subsidy is hardly enough to offer 1-yuan medical bills to more than 4,000 visiting patients annually.
While other village clinics charge about 50 yuan for the same service, Wu was reluctant to increase the price.
So where the government funds cannot cover costs, Wu makes it up with his own salary. To reduce costs, the elderly doctor also treks into the mountains to collect herbs for his traditional Chinese medicine therapies.
Dedicated to carrying on
The search for herbs brings back an extraordinary memory for Wu. In one of those trips in 1969, Wu witnessed a colleague fall off a cliff and die.
鈥淗is death moved me a lot,鈥 Wu said. 鈥淎fter that I decided to carry on his wish and stay in the job to care for more villagers.鈥
Between the 1950s and 1980s, China placed its rural population under a cooperative medical system, which featured a central role for barefoot doctors.
These farmer-doctors, many of whom had only basic medical training, were at the front of the nation鈥檚 fight against epidemics like malaria.
But now, according to a 2017 report by the Chinese Health Service Management journal, China鈥檚 rural doctors are aged. 鈥淚 hope there will be more young, college-educated doctors willing to stay in the countryside,鈥 Wu said.
鈥淚 plan to work until I cannot, and my son can take my position after that if there are no other successors. We just can鈥檛 leave those elderly villagers unattended.鈥
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