China to Beef Up Hospital Security

The medical industry in China just can't get an even break.  With doctors being bribed by drugmakers fighting to get their meds on the shelves in pharmacies, the story of man forced to amputate his own leg (and later regretted it) illustrates the pisspoor state that Chinese hospitals are in.  Prized appointment slots with top flight specialists are openly sold to the highest bidder outside of the clinics they operate in.

Violent attacks on doctors are causing concerns to the Politburo, not least because they scare away much needed medical graduates already put off by the low wages and God-awful working conditions that they'll have to endure for most of their career.  As far back as 2011, Chinese patients seeking recompense for botched operations have been thwarted by the dodgy legal system that blocks, stalls, and smears the victim.  The end result, predictably, is a violent one.

Plans were announced this week that hospital security is to beefed up in a national shake up aimed at preventing the nasty occupational hazard of departmental heads being hacked to death on their own wards.

Chinese medical writers have been quick to heave a sigh of "meh".  Zhu Youdi rightly blamed the violence on "a crisis of mutual trust and mutual communication between hospital and patients."

If a doctor succeeds in curing them, "patients are happy and willing to give bribes. But if a doctor receives bribes but fails to cure the patient, they lost both life and money, and the relatives will be extremely angry, it's impossible to ask them to behave in a rational manner," he said.

The new measures fail to tackle the problem, Zhu said. Only a thorough overhaul of China's medical system will reduce hospital violence, he said.

As the increasingly draconian laws that have neutered China's social networking sites have demonstrated, the trust of the people is getting harder and harder to come by these days.

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Danone Milk Powder Named in Hospital Bribery Expose

CCTV has hit paydirt!  What could better than a milk formula scandal involving foreign companies than a milk formula scandal involving a foreign company that was also involved in bribing nurses at a Chinese hospital.

Getting something of a twofer, a TV expose revealed that an unidentified sales manager had bribed nurses in a hospital in northern China to recommend it's milk powder to new mothers.

"Every year we would co-operate with the hospital, and give them gifts of money, each year amounting to several hundred thousand yuan," the former sales manager was quoted as saying in the report.

"We would come to tacit agreements, because in Tianjin competition is now so fierce. Every (hospital) floor would be divided up between milk powder brands, and if you didn't give a suitable amount of money, then perhaps the next month they would switch brands to someone else," she said.

The total amount that was "donated" was about 300,000rmb, ranging from small payments of several hundred yuan, to 10,000rmb.  Danone HQ in Paris, and Chinese reps for the company were unavailable for comment.  The company said in July that it was co-operating with National Development and Reform Commission, cutting the price of it's baby forumla by between 5 and 20 percent.

 

Another Anti-Corruption Website Launched

Intended to "smooth communication" between government and the general public, yet another website aimed at collecting tip offs about corrupt individuals was launched on Monday.

Long time China watchers, or those just amused with the way that things seems to be going around in circles these days in the Poltiburo might remember that a similar site was launched in 2007 ahead of the Olympics, which promptly crashed under the weight of users trying to log on.  Xinhua tried it's best to put a positive spin on the whole thing by saying that "The enthusiasm that greeted the launch of the website reflects the growing frustration felt by the general public towards corruption at government level," failing to point out that the number of people trying to report corrupt officials was tantamount to the site being DDOSed.

Down but not out, they tried again in 2011, when a series of websites carrying the "I Bribed" moniker flickered out of existence with little in the way of explanation.  Having been granted a license to operate the site, a number of hurried revisions were made to the sites mission statement, going from “Uncover the true faces of corrupt government officials” to “Reveal the harmfulness of corruption” in a few hours.  A couple of days after the site went live, announcements were made on Sina.com that the owners had shut down operations.

With one official site crushed by the eager masses, and two others that close their doors in a little under two days, we can only wonder how long the new site will last.