Experts at the University of Brighton have helped a district in China make massive savings in health costs by prescribing a simple pain reliever.
Whist engaged in teaching on a specially designed course provided at the university, staff discovered that every year thousands of people in the Shanghai Minhang Distric visited their local community healthcare centre or hospital for treatment for relatively minor illnesses such as fever, colds or flu.
With no developed family GP system, patients would turn to hospital doctors who often responded by putting patients on intravenous drips to infuse pain and fever relieving medications.
But advice from the faculty to only prescribe drugs such as paracetomol has reduced the number of patients put on drips from 25 per cent to 6.7 per cent at one of the community healthcare centre.
With drip treatments costing an average £20, the savings in a district of 600,000 people already run into millions of Yuan, and the efficiencies could spread.
More of Shanghai’s other nine districts, total population 20 million, are watching this development and may adopt the same procedure, and it may even be rolled out across China, population 1.3 billion. School of Nursing and Midwifery (SNM) and Brighton and Sussex Medical School Institute of Postgraduate Medicine (IPGM) representatives recently returned from Minhang where they have been in talks on developing a new programme in community health and public administration.
It is an exchange of ideas and the university and the UK’s health service are hoping to learn and possibly adopt new techniques, best practice and better systems from their colleagues in Minhang.
The school officials said stronger ties between the university and Minhang will likely see hospital and health managers of the future from Minhang coming to the faculty to study more of the UK’s medical systems and procedures. It may also include possible exchanges with clinical placements and research links.
Co-operation between University of Brighton and Shanghai Minhang started at a meeting of Profitnet, a business development programme created by the university in 2004. Attending the meeting was Profitnet member Dr Chulin Xia, who has been engaged as a visiting lecturer at the university’s School of Nursing and Midwifery, and who runs an education consultancy company in the UK. She has personal links with the Minhang local government and the connection led to the university being asked to develop educational programmes in health, language and education.
Dr Chulin Xia said the cooperation was beneficial to both sides. She said: “Whist we could show the Chinese healthcare professionals the management of our NHS, one of the best health services in the world, we could learn a great deal from the Chinese healthcare system, the speed of development and reform, the way they engage new ideas and technologies and the support from the central government and policy makers.”
Left to right – Dr Chulin Xia, Minghang/University of Brighton coordinator; Ms Victoria Molesworth, faculty business development manager; Dr Shirley Bach, head of SNM; Dr Chen Jia, vice director of the Shanghai and Minhang District Health Bureau and Community Health Centre; Dr Charles Wang, director of the Centre; Dr Jim Price, senior lecturer, IPGM; Ms Nita Muir, principal lecturer SNM.
The co-operation has grown and expanded and there have now been several exchange visits, the most recent was just before Christmas. Among those involved was Victoria Molesworth, the School of Nursing and Midwifery’s business development manager.
She outlined areas where the university is offering further training: “Minhang does not have a midwifery service like the UK and the university is providing health promotion and education skills to post-natal staff; staff training is being provided for home-care services for patients with hypertension and renal problems, freeing up hospital beds; and education is being provided to get patients to remove artefects and to remove clothing and wear gowns for X-rays to reduce the number of rejected images due to items like jewellery showing up.”
Clinical specialists from Minhang hospitals are planning to visit hospitals in the Brighton area this autumn to look at practices and to see how the university works with the hospitals. Minhang has also asked the university to develop a six-month programme to train clinical specialists and a three-month programme on community health.
Ms Molesworth said: “They are also interested in how we as a university work with our community through such projects as the Community University Partnership Programme, in a nurse student exchange, an honorary visiting fellow of the school, and in us opening an office in China to co-ordinate all of these activities.”
Ms Molesworth insisted this was not just a one-way street. She said: “There is a great deal we can and will learn from Minhang.”
