Assistance improves healthcare imbalance

Sending experts to less well-off areas ensures better medical outcomes

When neurologist Luo Bin was sent from his Beijing hospital to a county-level hospital in Inner Mongolia in 2020, he was saddened to see the scale of the patients' unmet medical needs.

During his seven-month stint in the autonomous region, his name was added to the list of the hundreds of medical specialists and other experts that have been sent to Inner Mongolia since 1998 to pass on their skills and help balance the nation's disparities in expertise.

Luo, from the capital's Aerospace Center Hospital, specializes in thrombolysis, a minimally invasive procedure to dissolve blood clots and restore the flow of cerebral blood in patients with ischemic stroke. The doctor is so skilled at the technique that he performs 500 of them annually in Beijing.