Healthcare

Question 1

Healthcare in rural china before:

Answer 1

Non existent - no trained doctors

Preferred herbal cures and remedies

Question 2

Why was disease such an issue for peasants?

Answer 2

• Rural peasants worked in awful conditions
• verge of starvation so immune systems suffered.
• Waterborne disease RIFE - human manure fertiliser!

Question 3

What were barefoot doctors?

Answer 3

Doctors/paramedics sent to rural areas to provide:
-basic hygiene
-disease prevention
-contraception.

Question 4

How many barefoot doctors by 1973?

Answer 4

1 million

Question 5

Cons of barefoot doctors

Answer 5

• only trained for 6 months
• little equipment and limited amounts of medicines but cheap
• only source of medical care in village

Question 6

Patriotic Healthcare Movement

Answer 6

Cent CCP party members into countryside to educate peasants on illness prevention:
- posters on how to catch rats and mosquitos/dig wells for drinking water
- personal hygiene promoted
- human waste as fertiliser discouraged

Question 7

Combatting malaria

Answer 7

Villages mobilised to drain malaria-breeding swamps

Question 8

Which diseses were eliminated or reduced and HOW?

Answer 8

Smallpox, cholera, typhus, plague, leprosy eliminated

Tuberculosis and parasitic diseased greatly reduced

Question 9

Other successes of healthcare reform:

Answer 9

• life expectancy rose and infant mortality fell (improved standard of midwifery)
• anti-drug campaigns greatly reduced sale and use of opium

Question 10

Failures of healthcare reform

Answer 10

• uneven health provisions in rural compared to urban china - only western style hospitals in cities
• famine caused health clinics in communes to be neglected
• doctors attacked during the antis-campaigns of the 1950s
• doctors denounced during CultRev. Doctors cancelled appointments and undertook cleaning jobs in hospitals to prove they did not think they were better than the workers