A video showing a nurse hitting and yelling at a patient lying on an operation table in China’s Inner Mongolia region last September picked up traffic from angry netizens on Chinese social media sites.
The patient, a woman who seemed to be in the gynecology department of the privately-run hospital, got into an argument with the medical staff halfway through the operation. One, a doctor, pushed the woman onto an operated table, and then a nurse began to slap her, the Guancha Syndicate reports.
In the video, the woman can be seen trying to kick the nurse. Screams and shouts of both women are audible.
The argument seems to have broken out when the patient refused to pay an additional fee announced mid-operation.
Conflicts between patients and hospital staff are common in China, and the issue of medical care is a heated social topic. These disputes can get bloody, as happened in a 2009 case when a doctor in Beijing was attacked by an angry patient with a knife and received 21 wounds.
A Chinese official told a human rights organization that there were 25,000 to 30,000 medical disputes annually in the province of Guangdong alone.
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