The not so general hospital

AUGUST 16, 2007: Boxxy's rather nasty coughing illness led to our first infiltration of what Wiki-Travel calls "China's hyper-capitalist health care system".

Bill predictably directed us to the best, most advanced, well serviced hospital in Songyuan, "Oilfield Hospital".

Oilfield Hospital, like the equally well-appointed Oilfield High School, is a private enterprise offering a base-level social service, owned by a government-owned company. Get it? Basically, a government-owned private hospital. The 'Communist' government has this preoccupation with appearing as capitalist as possible, both at home and abroad. (One day i hope to fill a book cataloguing this often tragic and still more often amusing irony.)

The lobby resembled a medium sized train station (admittedly at an unusually quiet time - it was full of people as opposed to teetering on the brink of implosion with people), complete with ragged cleaners trailing filthy mops around and indoor smoking. Its main purpose was to facilitate queuing at the endless rows of ticket windows. At Oilfield Hospital, all patients must queue up and pay each time before any treatment or consultation (except for oilfield employees, they instead queue up and flash a card before receiving treatment).

The consulting rooms, too, were a stereotypically Chinese affair. First of all, the familiar stench of toilets emanating from 10m down the corridor. And there is no waiting before you get to see the doctor in China. By that i don't mean there's no waiting before your consultation - rather, you join the queue inside the doctor's room and watch on while the doctor consults, listening to people in front of you describe their symptoms, history, medications, family tragedies etc. and holding your breath for the diagnosis. This is particularly interesting, i imagine, when you're a local in a city with 7 foreigners and one of them (who appears to you Chinese) is being consulted via an translator, while another (who appears decidedly less Chinese) stands by and chips in with earnest, mangled Chinese sentences.


The doctor ordered blood tests and x-rays, so of course we went straight back to the ticket counters to queue up and pay.

At the blood testing area there was again no waiting. And it wasn't hard to see why: no kind-hearted, reassuring nurses, no hydraulic pain-reducing tourniquet, no pomp and ceremony, just a row of 6 train station ticket windows, a strip of rubber tubing and a very industrious blood-taker who didn't even say hello.

The X-ray zone was also, by Western standards, nothing short of recklessly efficient. Again, no waiting. Just a doctor in one room, an X-ray machine next door. No lectures, no dressing gowns, removing of clothes containing metal, or emptying of pockets. No printouts were required, the doctor simply looked inside Boxxy's chest and slapped a big red 'normal' stamp on her test form. The reinforced steel door to the room containing the X-ray machine had on it an imposingly large radiation sign and a warning in Chinese. Still, no-one saw fit to waste any time closing it, even while the machine was firing its carcinogenic impulses.

Two hours later we returned to get the blood test results. We arrived during lunch hour and found the hospital deserted. There weren't even any doctors, except (so we were told) in emergency. In keeping with the consulting rooms' level of privacy, all the patients' blood test results were spread out across a counter to be picked up at the patients' leisure. I'd be surprised if HIV+ results got treated any differently.

"It just didn't seem sterilised," was Boxxy's take on it, though this description shouldn't be taken as a complaint because the medicine prescribed does seem to have cleared up her cough.