Chinese university receives largest ever donation from a doctor to help train the country’s medical graduates
- Dr Liu has been a keen supporter of China’s resident doctor training system, which he believes needs to be improved
- He hopes the money can be used to adopt a similar resident training system to that in use in the US
A leading Chinese anaesthetist has donated 100 million yuan (US$15.6 million) to train high-quality clinical doctors, state broadcaster CCTV reported.
Liu Jin, director of the Anaesthesia & Operation Center of West China Hospital of Sichuan University, southwestern China, received the money last year after the school signed a 750 million yuan (US$117.2 million) contract with a domestic pharmaceutical company to develop two anaesthetic drugs invented by Liu and his team.
In September, Liu made the donation to the university, based in the southwestern city of Chengdu, to support the training of clinical doctors. It is the largest donation made by a doctor in China, the report said.
“My family and I think it is a waste to use this money to improve our already comfortable life, while it will be significant for society if we donate it to the standardisation training system for resident doctors. The donation reflects our life values,” Liu, 65, told CCTV.
For the past two decades, the doctor has been a keen supporter of China’s resident doctor training system which he believes is vital to raising the quality of the country’s clinical doctors.
Liu said when he was doing postdoctoral research in the United States in the early 1990s, he discovered that the country’s medical graduates must receive three to five years of standardised training as resident doctors before practising medicine, unlike in China, where graduates work in hospitals directly after graduation. He said this resident doctor training system was the primary reason that America’s clinical doctors were of a higher standard than China’s.