The priority of medical facilities is to provide treatment and no patient should be turned away for any reason, Chinese Vice Premier Sun Chunlan said on Thursday.
Sun made the remarks after an incident that a pregnant woman had lost her unborn baby amid COVID-19 restrictions that delayed her entry into a Xi'an hospital.
Protection of human lives takes the utmost priority, Sun said at a meeting called after the incident to address the improvement of medical services for people in need. Medical treatment should be classified according to different medical needs of the patients, she said.
On the evening of January 1, the pregnant woman experiencing contractions was denied entry at a Xi'an hospital because she failed to timely produce a negative COVID-19 test result as required. She was admitted only after her massive hemorrhage outside the hospital, but it was too late to save the unborn baby.
Xi'an, capital of northwest China's Shaanxi Province, has been locked down since December 23, 2021 to fight a recent outbreak of COVID-19 infections.
The incident triggered an uproar among Chinese netizens. An official investigation was launched and it has been ascertained an accident caused by negligence. Several hospital officials have been fired or suspended. Liu Shunzhi, director of Xi'an's health commission, publicly apologized to the woman and promised to learn from the lesson.
As long as protective measures are taken, medical workers need to take in and treat critical patients promptly, regardless of whether they can show a negative COVID-19 test result, said Sun.
The incident has exposed other problems, she said. China's health emergency hotline number 120 was unreachable when the woman's family wanted to rush her to the hospital, and they called 110, the police hotline, instead.
Sun said inspectors had been assigned to look into the issue, and measures will be taken to ensure patients' calls are dealt with speedily.
Designated hospitals, Sun said, should ensure that dialysis patients, cancer patients receiving radiotherapy and chemotherapy, as well as pregnant women and newborns needing urgent treatment receive continuous medical services.
