Matters of the heart out in the countryside

City doctors are lending their expertise to rural colleagues to improve the level of healthcare.

As rain fell in the township of Tuoding, Yunnan province, one day in July, a group of local doctors and village health workers gathered in a conference room of the township's health center listening attentively to medical experts from Beijing.

With a row of mannequins lying on the floor, the experts explained how to carry out cardiopulmonary resuscitation, and the local medical workers were soon practicing the skill.

Xu Mingjun, director of the anesthesiology department at the Beijing Obstetrics and Gynecology Hospital attached to Capital Medical University, walked around the room inspecting the way the trainees were performing their tasks.

It took Tashi Nyima, one of the locals, a while to successfully administer artificial respiration to his mannequin. He performed several more times under the guidance of Xu and later explained sheepishly that he was not used to the soft "lower jawbone".

He has to administer CPR from time to time in his work. However, when he is overly anxious about a patient's state he sometimes conducts the chest compression phase too quickly, he said.

Tashi Nyima and his colleagues were also impressed on hearing Xu explain that it is appropriate to compress a patient's chest down to 3 to 4 centimeters instead of 5 to 6 cm, as reference books often suggest, because Chinese people usually have smaller frames than Westerners.

Xu, director of the Beijing branch of a national committee of CPR training and promotion organized by the Chinese Society of Cardiothoracic and Vascular Anesthesiology, and his team have been holding CPR training events in hospitals and universities, and outside tourist attractions in Beijing, aimed at medical professionals and lay people alike.

"CPR is an important and practical skill for saving lives, especially of those suffering from asphyxia, but the skill is poorly trained in China," Xu says.