People’s average life expectancy, mortality rate of pregnant or maternity women and mortality rate of infants are the three most important indicators to evaluate residents’ health level of a certain country or region.
By 2007, the infants’ mortality rate of Beijing had dropped to under 4‰, which shows that the rate of the city has reached the level of developed countries. The figure continued to fall to 3.70‰ in 2008, which indicates the sound living conditions and health security of infants in Beijing.
According to international common practice, reasons for children’s death are counted and analyzed respectively through mortality rates of infants (0 to under 1 year old) and children under 5, the results of which present a different sequence of death reasons for children of each age group. In 2008, the top 3 death reasons for children under 5 in the Beijing region were congenital heart diseases, asphyxia at birth and low weight due to premature birth. Among them, the number one reason for death among children of 1-4 years old was accidental injuries, which accounted for 28.6% of death in this age group.
Over recent years, through training health-care pediatricians in their screening and identification capability as well as auscultative techniques regarding congenital heart diseases, the city has made efforts to enable them to find out suspected patients of this kind of disease as early as possible during children’s physical checkup and to transfer patients to designated hospitals to receive diagnosis as well as timely and effective treatment. For example, 12 children suspected to be patients of congenital heart diseases were screened out by community-based health-care pediatricians in Pinggu District in 2008 and 5 of them were then confirmed by hospital. The fact that the mortality rate caused by congenital heart diseases among children under 5 has kept falling is enough to prove how significant it is for community-based health-care pediatricians to keep improving their capability of auscultation and diagnostic identification in terms of screening out child patients with the disease at an early stage and decreasing infants’ mortality rate.
The Beijing Municipal Health Bureau will implement a new measure of “free screening of congenital diseases among new born babies” and provide blood oxygen saturation testers for community-based health-care pediatricians to use for measuring oxygen saturation of infants’ blood at their finger tip during the screening checkup when visiting new born babies in communities. This kind of easy and non-traumatic checkup can determine whether there’s oxygen shortage in the babies and screen out child patients with cyanotic congenital heart disease.
In 2008, there were altogether 16 children aged 1-4 killed by traumas in Beijing City, mainly due to drowning and traffic accidents. Among the dead, all of the 6 drowned children were from rural areas. It can be concluded that most accidental death of children are avoidable, therefore, we call upon the whole society to pay more attention to children’s health and safety, and carry out safety-related education, which is not only a responsibility of the Ministry of Health, but also a common one of communities, kindergartens and children's parents as well.