Opinion | The hospital scandal continues to eat in public trust in China's healthcare system

In mid -April, a letter circulated on the Internet. Apparently it was written by a woman who accused her husband, China-Japan Friendship Hospital surgeon Xiao Fei, to have cheated on her with Junior Doctor Dong Xiying. It was more disturbing that Xiao left an anesthetized patient on the operating table so that he could defend Dong against a critical colleague.

The hospital's reaction was to announce on April 27 that Xiao would fire it after he had grasped the allegations in the letter as true. But that did not suppress public trouble because people soon turned their attention to Dong, the female protagonist of the scandal.

In the media and online, questions about their unconventional path to medicine were raised. Traditionally, everyone who wants to become a doctor in China has to be in about 10 years, including three years of residence training.

Dong is an economic graduate that has switched to medicine via the experimental “4+4” program of the Beijing Union Medical College and enables graduates of non-medical disciplines to complete Doctor of Medicine Studies in just four years.

The US program was launched by College in 2018. At that time, College President Wang Chen said that the idea was to break through the previous restrictions on medical training and to recruit multidisciplinary talents.