Research suggests village doctors' livelihoods worsened

The livelihoods of China's "barefoot" doctors, those serving China's vast rural areas, have worsened as a result of ongoing medical reform, according to a report released by the Institute of Economics of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) on Saturday in Beijing.

The authors researched village doctors' living and working conditions, particularly the influence of medical reforms, through online questionnaires that collected 3,409 replies in total.

The report said, since medical reform was launched, village doctors' incomes have declined dramatically, at an average rate of 50 percent.

According to the report, the list of essential medicines cannot satisfy patients' drug use demands, which also makes village clinics ineffective.

The essential medicine system requires doctors to prescribe only essential medicines and to sell those medicines with zero mark-up, or at wholesale prices. Previous prescriptions included a 15-percent mark-up.

Furthermore, the zero mark-up policy has taken away village doctors' major source of income, as village clinics rely heavily on drug sales for revenue.

Yao Yu, one of the CASS researchers, said the study was carried out to make village doctors' voices heard, so that greater attention could be paid to this group of people in the policy-making of medical reform.

Barefoot doctors are farmers who receive minimal medical and paramedical training and work in rural villages to offer basic medical services. They have become part of the major grassroots health care system in China, and have been introduced to other developing countries by the World Health Organization.