Beijing is taking a novel approach to protecting doctors from growing violence from patients: volunteer "guardian angels."
The campaign will recruit students, medical workers and other patients to act as middlemen between doctors and those in their care to defuse disagreements and smooth over tensions, the official Xinhua News Agency reported Wednesday.
Doctors in China have come under increasing threat as the country's health care system struggles to cope with low doctor numbers, poor levels of training and rampant corruption inflating the price of care. This has led to a number of fatal attacks by patients on doctors in the past year.