Editor’s note: On the morning of April 7, 2022, a special press conference on “World Health Day” was held in Beijing. Wu Wenming, Vice President of PUMCH, attended the conference to brief attendees about the hospital’s health promotion efforts. The following is the transcript of Vice President Wu Wenming’s answers to journalists’ questions:

Phoenix TV: Public hospitals are one of the main venues for health promotion and play an important role in improving mass health literacy. What are the practices and innovations of PUMCH in promoting health literacy in the new era?

Wu Wenming: At the core, health literacy promotion is about popularizing health knowledge, including popularizing health common sense and disseminating scientific knowledge. As early as 1926 (the year of Bing Yin in China’s Sexagenary Cycle), a group of PUMCH medical staff members established the Bing Yin Medical Society, which mainly aimed to awaken the health consciousness and hygiene consciousness of the modern Chinese people. Over the past 100 years, PUMCHers have made many contributions to the promotion of health literacy, especially after we entered the new era, when we carried out a series of health promotion tasks revolving around “prevention, diagnosis, control, treatment and rehabilitation” under the important guidance of President Xi Jinping that “we should view scientific popularization as equally important as scientific and technological innovation as they are the two wings for realizing innovative development”.

First, scientific leadership of the academic community. In order to do a good job in health promotion, PUMCH has specially set up a medical science popularization committee and a pool of experts in science popularization; since the release of the Healthy China Initiative in 2019, there has been a significant increase in PUMCH’s support to science popularization and in the engagement of experts.

Second, professional content. In 2017, the “Voice of PUMCH Doctors” official WeChat account went live to popularize knowledge about health and medical science and technology; to that end, it posts more than 100 articles on health knowledge every year to provide health guidance to the public, drawing widespread attention from the public. In particular, in 2021, on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of PUMCH, we launched the “Centennial PUMCH” health science popularization month campaign, which received nearly 200 million views and played an exemplary and pioneering role for health promotion. We are also committed to academic health popularization activities, for example, the National Rare Disease Diagnosis and Treatment Collaborative Network led by PUMCH has conducted many training sessions in various places across China that cover more than 80 rare diseases, and trained more than 100,000 doctors in the process. In addition, the Department of Rheumatology held online academic popularization activities such as “MDT - Decoding Lupus”, which scored views of more than 3 million.

Third, demand-driven. PUMCH also tailors the dissemination of health science to the needs of patients; it has established more than ten patient clubs and provided more than ten special voluntary services for them. For example, the “Nutritional Weight Loss” team has prescribed scientific weight loss formulas for obese patients, which have helped nearly 100,000 obese people successfully lose weight happily; the “Pink Garden” volunteer service team for breast cancer patients has evolved from visiting patients to practically solving problems and offering all-around help. Some medical and nursing staff members joined ophthalmology patients’ WeChat group to provide extended services for post-operative ophthalmology patients. At the beginning of pandemic, an online consultation service was provided for free and the advice on fever, nutrition and lifestyle, among others, benefited hundreds of thousands of people.

People’s Daily: What is the key to building health-promoting hospitals? What contributions can hospitals make to patriotic health campaigns?

Wu Wenming: Thank you for your question. Hospitals are the core institutions in driving health promotion. Both hospitals and medical staff are advocates of health concepts, disseminators of health knowledge and promoters of healthy behaviors.

Let me give you an example. During the pandemic, what we hear about the most is wearing masks and washing hands, but why do we need to do that? Ignaz Semmelweis, a Hungarian obstetrician from the mid-19th century, was known as the pioneer of hand washing as his advocacy of it in his hospital reduced the mortality rate due to post-operative puerperal fever from 18% to 2%. This is an example of hand hygiene reform.

Public hospitals, under the guidance of the National Health Commission, have been improving the effectiveness of nosocomial infection prevention and control by increasing handwashing and body surface bacteria sampling of medical staff and stepping up supervision of them for rectification. The stronger awareness of wearing masks and frequent hand washing instilled in people during the COVID-19 pandemic is a contribution to health promotion by medical staff.

That’s why at the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak, PUMCH quickly released personal safety tips and precautions and a short video of “Seven Steps of Proper Handwashing”, which received over one million views in just a few hours. This is a case in point about the very important and leading role that medical staff play in advocacy of professional and standard approaches and in health promotion and health knowledge dissemination.

PUMCH’s efforts in patriotic health campaigns can be traced back to the early days of the founding of the country. In the 1950s and 1960s, PUMCHers, represented by Professors Zhang Xiaoqian, Lin Qiaozhi, Zeng Xianjiu and Huang Jiasi, went to the fields of rural areas to carry out health publicity activities and compiled, among others, “Questions and Answers on Rural Women’s Health”, which raised the awareness of the rural public about health and hygiene. Subsequently, PUMCHers leveraged the increasingly prevalent television and other media to disseminate health knowledge more widely. Over the past century, PUMCHers have always adhered to the philosophy of “putting people first and doing everything for patients”. PUMCH is just a microcosm of all medical institutions that have been working hard to promote health.

China Daily: Many PUMCH doctors are often invited to be guests at TV programs and many have become health promotion KOLs, so how does the hospital view such scientific popularization efforts by doctors, any encouraging and supporting measures for them?

Wu Wenming: Thank you for your question. In fact, the hospital attaches great importance to the work of science popularization. It has made unified arrangements and meticulously organized experts to participate in science popularization work. For example, the PUMCH experts that you see in TV programs such as “ Yang Sheng Tang” (Health and Awareness) and “Jian Kang Zhi Lu ” (Road to Health) are all medical staff members with experience in health communication, including doctors, nurses and health-related employees. The hospital has always taken a supportive and encouraging attitude towards the participation of medical staff in health science popularization activities. Nevertheless, we do uphold several principles.

First, ensure the quality of science popularization through the system. In the process of health knowledge promotion and dissemination, be it standards, knowledge system or expert advice, medical staff must conform to the industry norms related to health science popularization. The hospital has also introduced a new media management system to guide experts to carry out such activities in a standardized and orderly manner.

Second, discover and cultivate science popularization talents through competition events. For example, the hospital has created the “Healthy China, PUMCH in Action” science popularization competition, in which media mentors and science mentors together guide and lead the younger generation of medical staff to actively participate in science popularization work. From this process a vigorous, competent and influential team of science popularization emerges.

Third, foster a favorable cultural atmosphere for science popularization. This year, PUMCH will launch a cross-industry and cross-specialization “PUMCH Sparkle” health science popularization program, which will bring together the medical and media community to produce more high-quality science popularization works that will guide people to see and respond to health issues and diseases in a more positive light and contribute to the Healthy China initiative.

Vice President Wu Wenming(the first from right) on the “World Health Day” press conference

Reporter: Hong Chengwei and Chen Mingyan

Translator: Liu Haiyan

Editor: Wang Yao