Has anyone received medical care with Grace Medical Services or elsewhere in Kunming?
What was your experience like?
Especially interested in any information related to medical care for children, as we will soon be moving to Kunming with an almost 1-year-old.
I have no experiece with care for children, but the new Calmette International Hospital has an American pediatric clinic run by Sanford.
We've been using the Kunming Sino-UK Angel Women’s & Children’s Hospital for our Two year old since he was born and I can highly recommend it. Surely the best place in Kunming for children's health with the latest equipment and the service that goes with it is outstanding to.
A press review review from Two years back shows the standards they reach here : www.tuv.com/[...]
No experience with care for children, but I've had good (not perfect - 1 drug was overprescribed) experience with Kunming No. 2 hospital for a potentially quite serious skin problem - which, thanks to them, I no longer have (5 years). Yeah, I had to wait half an hour to an hour to see the doctor several times and I had to run around to different departments and collect test results myself, but so what. Cost of consultation, blood tests, X-rays etc. was very minimal - meds bought at the hospital pharmacy may have been slightly more expensive than if I'd bought them elsewhere.
This followed fairly useless, yet more expensive, experience with the (apparently independent and private) skin disease hospital on Renminxilu.
Hospitals care about their profits, beware of useless medicine and care.
Last year between me and my wife we had a minor surgery and childbirth in Kunming (incidently the two were somehow related!).
Here are links to accounts of those experiences:
We have also continued to visit the same maternity hospital for monthly checkups and vaccinations for our now 9 month old healthy boy.
Overall and beyond this, my biggest concern in medical care here is language barrier - not so much the medicine part.
Great information!
I am also curious to hear any stories about medical emergencies and the best way to handle those in Kunming.
Well, there's an emergency telephone number, 3 digits (similar to 911 in the US), but I can't remember what they are. Best bet is probably to get the person to a hospital emergency room as soon as possible in a vehicle of convenience.
Advice, from limited experience.
Ambulance: Don’t wait for one get in a cab. Ambulances do not have paramedics on board, they are only shuttles. They will take you to a hospital they are connected to, which might be a TCM hospital.
Hospitals: The community hospitals are not equipped to deal with basic first aid, except perhaps burns,
I have heard of people being turned away.
The main hospitals are very well equipped now. CT scanners, ICUs, etc. You can get a CT the same day.
Get the names of the big hospitals and keep them in your head/wallet/purse in case of emergency, you can tell/show it to a taxi driver.
If it is an emergency, you still need to register. Pay the extra (used to be 100rmb) to register VIP, and you will be seen immediately.
In March of 2014, I had a medical emergency in Kunming at about 4am. I was lucky enough to have Chinese friends with a car that came and took me to the hospital. I had gone to the Second Affiliated Hospital before so I had them take me there.
You need your passport and cash. There was a long line of cars waiting to get into the car park. The husband had the wife drive while he went in to rent a wheelchair. By the time he got the chair we were almost in the car park. I gave the wife two Chinese ATM cards and the PIN numbers so she could get cash for me. I was put in the emergency area, they rented a bed for me and used some of my money to get me admitted.
I could not stand or walk. Nor could I transition in and out of the wheel chair. The only food I ate was brought in by friends.
While in the emergency area, I saw emergency surgery performed twice a couple of beds away.
After about 48 hours in emergency, I was relocated to a 4 bed room. My friends arranged for a "body man" to assist me. He lifted, carried, and pushed me around.
One of the Chinese patients in the room also had a body man. The other two were attended by family. I had my body man put me in the chair and wheel me out of the hospital to a side street where I bought my meals. Not once in 11 days was I served hospital food.
I had a stroke and they did CTs, MRIs and x-rays and was lucky to get a neurologist who spoke good English and provided good medical care. I was asked for money after a few days and my friends showed up with some cash.
On the 11 day my sons arrived from the US. They booked a flight home. It was a little difficult to get checked out of the hospital as the airline needed a doctor's release to get on the plane.
The doctor said I should stay another week or two to be safe. I called a doctor in the US who said it would be okay to fly.
The Chinese doctor refused to release me so I told her I was her grandfather and she would have to pay. A half hour later I was in John Xie's van and on the way to my apartment.
In short, you need your passport, cash and helpful Chinese friends.
tigertiger's info is good.
