China is home to 135,000 pediatricians but there are only four pediatricians per 10,000 children. In 2019, more than 10 percent of pediatricians resigned and most of them were below 35. According to a study by the Chinese Medical Association in 2019, Chinese pediatric medicine faces five challenges, including a shortfall of qualified pediatricians, unbalanced distribution across the country, relatively low education, heavy workloads and growing talent outflow. To address these problems, the Ministry of Education has taken a number of measures in recent years to strengthen training, in particular for practitioners at the grass-roots level, and to expand enrollment of pediatric graduate students. Many Chinese hospitals generate income by selling medicines and providing medical checkups, but children’s medicines are administered according to a child’s weight, so fewer medicines are sold. Experts recommended raising the salaries of pediatricians and improving work conditions.
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