In Violent Hospitals, China's Doctors Can Become Patients
Several hundred doctors and nurses jammed the courtyard of the No. 1 People's Hospital in Wenling, a city with a population of about 1 million in Zhejiang province, a four-hour train ride south of Shanghai.
They wore surgical masks to hide their identities from the government and waved white signs that read, "Zero tolerance for violence."
"Doctors and nurses must be safe to take care of people's health!" video shows them chanting.
The medical workers were reacting to a triple stabbing at the hospital three days earlier. Wenling officials responded by deploying dozens of riot police, further angering already traumatized hospital staff.
"Withdraw the special forces," chanted the nurses and doctors, many of whom wore white lab coats.
The last couple of weeks have been bad ones for medical workers in China, even by the violent standards of the country's hospitals. In addition to the attack in Wenling on Oct. 25, another angry patient in Harbin, in China's far northeast, stabbed a doctor to death. And in south China's Guangdong province, family members of a patient who died beat two doctors, leaving one with kidney damage.
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