Putting People First

PEOPLE’S livelihood is always the top priority for the Chinese government.

- YANG SHUANGSHUANG

It is of particular concern now due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. At this time when economic development is plagued with unprecedented challenges, how to ensure people’s livelihood has become an important topic to deputies to the National People’s Congress (NPC) and members of the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) in 2020.

Convenient Online Medical Consultations

“My proposal to this year’s NPC session is to build online hospitals to optimize the medical system as soon as possible,” said Zhou Songbo, an NPC deputy who is a rural doctor in the Zhuozhou City of Hebei Province. On May 20, after registering for the third session of the 13th NPC in Beijing, he distributed a stack of paper printed with the WeChat two-dimensional QR code of his hospital to his fellow deputies for use in the case they needed medical consulting.

Over the past few decades, Zhou encountered many elderly patients who could neither tell the doctor the nature of their illness clearly nor understand the doctor’s advice, which distressed both doctors and patients.

“I then came up with a solution. I printed the We- Chat QR code of our hospital on a piece of paper and asked the elderly to give it to their children. Through scanning the code, their families could get in touch with the hospital and then report the elderly person’s health conditions in detail through a video call with our doctors. In that way, I’m able to do more remote consultations,” Zhou said.

Zhou explored the delivery of online medical services when he was attending the NPC session in 2018 as a way to serve patients back in his hometown. He said remote video and telephone consultations played a big role during the novel coronavirus pandemic.