480,000 Xiamen residents have family doctors

On February 14th, a week-long city-wide event named ‘Do You Have a Family Doctor’ began. Organised by the Xiamen City Health and Family Planning Commission, this initiative popularising healthy tips and family doctor service, is being carried out in six Xiamen districts.

Xiamen’s family doctor service implements "The Three-doctor Joint Management Model” which means getting closer to management, promoting a high degree of trust and strengthening the ability to realise agreements.

With the advancement of the family doctor services, the lack of grass-roots service staff has become a bottleneck to the further expansion of the family doctor services. In order to solve this problem, Xiamen will let retired doctors and doctors on-the-job volunteer to join the programme, which will also utilise existing medical resources and impel the necessary reforms in public hospitals. It will continue to enhance personnel training as well.

Since the programme first began in September 2016, more than 480,000 Xiamen residents have already signed contracts with family doctors. As of January 31st this year, the signing up rate stood at 22.86%, with the family coverage exceeded 38%  and this including some 260,000 households.

Among Xiamen’s districts, Siming District took the lead in signing up residents, with 163,386 people joining, in excess of 22.37%.

The catalogues of the clinical disease treated will increase to fifteen to include diabetes, high blood pressure and chronic renal insufficiency. Patients who suffer  from those diseases will be able to receive treatment at community outpatient centres instead of having to go to major hospitals.