setting

the hospital is really nice. it is set up sort of like our own in KC, with the Hospital and Clinics sort of model. It is a Women's and Children's Hospital. Like I was told before I came here, a lot of their stuff, like equipment and facility, is nicer than ours. It's about an 850 bed place with full tertiary care options for all. There is an older hospital too in the older part of town with another few hundred beds. They even have a separate ob/gyn ED. A hospital like this in the states would cost probably several times more for labor and land. The entire place is draped in white marble. Inpatient now is pretty light due to the holidays. All of their inpatient doc is via a computer system except for some areas in the ICUs. and of course , their heart cases are at a standstill too due to the holidays.. Radiology is a separate system and they do not have PACS. The patients take a lot more responsibilities like administrating their own meds by the parents. oh, and they also pay up front if the docs decide they need to be admitted - like a lot of other countries in the world. they pay a 3000 RMB account from which meds and other charges like nursing get deducted from. the family typically finds ways to get this and if not on the first night, they spend it in the ED under observation status. oddly enough, they even had a case of MSUD. their newborn screen is only 3 diseases though. it was pretty hard to understand everything, since unlike HK, everything is in Chinese, including the culture results and MIC/resistance patterns! plus, I really don't speak Mandarin at all, which a lot of docs use since they are from elsewhere in China and my Cantonese medical speak is horrible.

new post will be about the clinic