Rowan Family Medicine physicians helping to transform health care in China

Rowan Family Medicine physicians are helping Dr. Hua Wu and Dr. Yongjian Zhang to revolutionize health care in China.

Dr. Wu and Dr. Zhang are at the forefront of an effort by the Chinese government to transform its health care system from one that relies on specialists to one, more like that in the United States, where family medicine physicians are a patient’s first stop for medical care.

Drs. Wu and Zhang, from China’s Shenzhen City, Guangdong Province, have spent six weeks observing clinical hours and learning the training techniques used by Rowan Family Medicine to train medical students and residents to become primary care physicians. Their visit is part of a massive effort launched in 2006 by the Chinese government, and supported by the International Primary Care Educational Alliance, to retrain many specialist physicians to became primary care doctors.

When Drs. Wu and Zhang return to China, they will, in turn, be help teach the physicians and medical students in Shenzhen, where fewer than 3,000 family physicians provide for the primary care needs of more than 16 million people. Plans call for the training of another 3,000 new family physicians in next five years.

“In China, the ratio of patients to primary care physicians could be upwards of five times what it is here in America,” said Dr. Joshua Coren, chair of Rowan Family Medicine. “This collaborative agreement with the Shenzhen Medical Continuing Education Center – the second international training program conducted in our Sewell and Stratford residency sites – gives us a unique opportunity to contribute to bringing primary care services to millions of Chinese families.”  

Rowan Family Medicine physicians and staff have been involved in this effort since 2007, hosting groups of physicians from China and sending its own physicians there to help retrain the Chinese health care workforce.

In fact, Dr. Coren and Rowan Family Medicine’s Dr. Adarsh Gupta have each made two training trips to China. In September, Dr. Gupta returned from China’s Sichuan Province where he led a group of 16 trainee physicians who shadowed him as he was seeing patients.

“I focused on various aspects of primary care teaching, including disease management, patient-physician collaboration and how patient interaction occurs in America,” Dr. Gupta said. “How we approach a patient’s chief complaint and document the visit are essential to the holistic approach of osteopathic medicine.”

Dr. Wu noted that the humanistic approach he observed during his time with the Rowan Medicine physicians would be helpful in training physicians in China.

“The way Rowan doctors communicate with patients shows that they care,” he said. “They answer a lot of questions and take a lot of time to educate their patients. This is not an easy thing to learn, but I hope that we can bring more about this method back to China.”  

Despite the current differences in care between the two countries, Dr. Wu pointed out that there is also a significant similarity between Chinese medicine and osteopathic medicine as practiced in the United States.

“The holistic approach behind osteopathic medicine is very close to Chinese traditional medicine,” Dr. Wu explained.

Dr. Wu is also the director of the General Practice Education and Training Office of the Shenzhen Continuing Medical Education Center. A former pediatrician, he has been practicing primary care for nearly six years. Dr.Zhang is a former gastroenterologist who transitioned to primary care seven years ago.