Talking with my host, Dr. Meng, and the other faculty at the 2nd Hospital of Hebei Medical University in Shijiazhuang City and the Airbnb hosts I'm staying with in Beijing, a big realization about healthcare in China emerged: Primary care is nearly non-existent. Most people seek medical attention, even for relatively minor concerns such as colds and scrapes, at hospitals instead of seeing a community provider. As you can imagine, this can drastically overload hospital capacity quickly and makes care access and delivery inefficient. Medical access being primarily hospital-based also creates the problem of misappropriation of resources. Patients often self-diagnose in order to book an appointment at a hospital clinic with a specialist in a specific department, such as cardiology or endocrinology, only to find that they misdiagnosed their problem, visiting the wrong kind of specialist,
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