Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
you're buying your food and things like that. But if you do that you can still have many
years of totally fulfilling life here.”
As a newcomer to Beijing, it's only natural that you're going to have more confidence in a
hospital environment that feels familiar to you, so checking yourself in to one of the vast,
typically chaotic local Chinese hospitals is probably going to raise your blood pressure
rather than lower it.
Unfortunately, when it comes to local hospitals, there is no shortage of horror stor-
ies—avoidance of treating foreigners for fear of them dying on hospital grounds, leftover
blood and body fluids, outrageous under-the-table payments to doctors just so that they will
see the patient, overprescribing by doctors who supplement their meager official income
with bonuses from drug companies. The list goes on, and, in truth, the Chinese medical sys-
tem is in need of a major overhaul.
It's not all doom and gloom, however, and there are many outstanding facilities that you
should feel as confident in as you would in a hospital back home. Beijing in particular has
benefited from improvements, and generally standards are now a long shot from what they
were 10 years ago. It's also home to some of the best hospitals in the country, staffed with
extensively experienced medical teams and equipped with top-of-the-line medical equip-
ment. Medical techniques are also largely in line with those in the West, and while Chinese
medicine is still popular, Western medication is now standard.
The issue is trying to sort the bad hospitals from the good ones. One way to start is
to understand how hospitals in China are organized. First there are government hospitals.
These are graded from level one to three, with level one being small county hospitals that
are really more like clinics and best avoided; level two being medium-sized district hospit-
als; and level three being city-, provincial- or national-level hospitals. These top-level hos-
pitals are large and comprehensive. They have specialist care units as well as teaching and
research facilities. Each of the three levels is then subdivided further with a grading of A, B,
or C. Officially, the top two hospitals in China are Peking Union Medical College Hospital
(Xiéhé Y
ī
yuàn), near Wangfujing, and the Chinese PLA General Hospital (Ji
ě
fàngj
ū
n Z
ǒ
ng
Y
ī
yuàn) near Wukesong subway station in Haidian. Other 3A-grade hospitals in Beijing in-
clude the China-Japan Friendship Hospital (Zh
ō
ngrì Y
ǒ
uh
ǎ
o Y
ī
yuàn) and Beijing Anzhen
