It is well-known that most hospitals in major Chinese cities might be among the most crowded resulting in the doctors being among the busiest in the world.

®MDNM¯It is also not news that, because of the lack of medical consultation, the elderly in China with ordinary diseases will frequent those crowded hospitals and end up getting limited information.

This situation will be worse as China is entering a so-called aging society with over 128 million of its people being at least 60 years old.

An International Meeting on Community Health Care in Aging Societies, which started Monday in Shanghai and will run until Wednesday, is trying to address these problems.

Experts present at the conference, organized by the World Health Organization (WHO) Kobe Centre, call social attention to problems concerning "all of us.''

Participants said that China should take more rapid and serious steps to shift its focus of health from pure treatment of diseases to a comprehensive set of health services including prevention, health care, consultation and treatment.

"We are highly concerned about what is happening in China,'' said Yuji Kawaguchi, director of WHO Kobe Centre.

More rural people are flooding into cities in China, such as Shanghai, which caused the situation in cities to get more demanding, according to Kawaguchi.

Social organizations in cities, both medicare facilities and the social welfare system, have yet to keep up with the demands, both Kawaguchi and Guo Shenggui, representative from the State's Ministry of Health said.

Kawaguchi thinks the one-child policy in China is a wise one.

"But it also means that social responsibilities to take care of the aged people will increase and adjusted to more rapidly,'' he said. "I think the adjustment is currently the biggest challenge to Chinese policy makers.''

Participants at the meeting agreed that a community-based health care system might be the most effective and cost-saving organisms to help solve the problems.

"The aged population is not a homogeneous group, and the health care programme should be based more on individuals,'' he said. "A community-based health care programme is therefore most effective.''

He had high praise for a community-based health care trial programme that had been carried out in some metropolitan cities in China, like Shanghai and Beijing.

Cities like Shanghai are like a magnet attracting large proportion of the immigrant population, he said.

"Such experience and model can be very valuable to all cities in the country and the world as well.''

(From China Daily)