East China’s Jiangsu province has made unremitting efforts to help improve the healthcare service in Yili Prefecture of northwest China’s Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region through the paired-up support program.
In 2020, Jiangsu started to send medical teams to Xinjiang in a bid to train the local medical workers.
Eight key doctors were selected to support the Xinjiang Yili Friendship Hospital in a bid to improve the overall medical level. The doctors include hospital management specialists, department specialists, and professional and technical staff.
At the end of 2020, Jiangsu also allocated 35 million yuan for Jiangsu Provincial People's Hospital to build the Yili Prefecture Clinical Medicine Research Institute for research on common and frequently occurring diseases in Xinjiang.
"Since the tenth group of medical talents was sent to assist Xinjiang, we have changed our mindset from a single doctor treating a single patient to training high-level medical talents for the locality and cultivating high-level local medical talents," said Zhang Weizhong, Deputy Dean of Yili Prefecture Friendship Hospital and Deputy Chief Physician of Jiangsu Provincial People's Hospital.
Jiangsu has dispatched aid teams to support Xinjiang in fields such as medical care, education, agriculture, culture, tourism, and park construction.
In the Nalati Grassland Scenic Spot in Xinyuan County, some Jiangsu officials are responsible for scenic area management, while others are involved in planning and design by introducing Wuxi Lingshan Group to build a flower sea and Jinling Hotel Group to operate and manage Nalati Hotel in the joint efforts to create a world-class tourism, leisure and vacation destination. The Nalati Grassland Scenic Spot has so far created jobs for 210000 local people.
"In the past we earned somewhere between 15,000 yuan to 20,000 yuan by grazing the animals, but now we can earn 300,000 yuan a year by accommodating visitors at the scenic area," said a local Uighur resident.
Assisted by the teachers from Jiangsu, Yili Prefecture won the best record in history in the National Vocational College Skills Competition in 2021 by winning the first prize in the past five years.
Jiangsu has also established a characteristic industrial park in Yili and introduced Jiangsu's crabs and crayfish for breeding in Yili.
At the same time, Yili’s fruits, beef and mutton were sold to Jiangsu. A number of cultural projects such as Yili Prefecture Museum and Lin Zexu Memorial Hall have been transformed and upgraded.
