Directive on the Report by the Ministry of Health Party Leadership Group on Organizing Urban Senior Medical Personnel to Go to the Countryside and Training Rural Doctors (January 21, 1965)

Approved for implementation.

Mao Zedong
January 21, 1965

Printed from a typescript copy preserved by the Central Archives.

**Note**
〔1〕 The report submitted by the Ministry of Health Party Leadership Group to Mao Zedong on January 20, 1965, states: In accordance with your directive on organizing urban senior medical personnel to go to the countryside and training rural doctors, the Party Leadership Group immediately held discussions and invited some representatives from the National People’s Congress and the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference in the health sector for a symposium. All expressed support and pledged resolute implementation.

1. Organize senior medical personnel to go to the countryside in batches and stages to carry out mobile medical services and train grassroots health workers. They will first go to key counties in the socialist education movement to coordinate with the "Four Cleanups" movement, so as to improve the ideological conduct of medical personnel through social practice. In the future, organizing urban medical personnel to rotate in providing mobile medical services in the countryside shall be established as a regular system.

2. Regarding the issue of training rural health personnel, the following measures are planned:
   (1) Continue to properly run the existing 16 specialized medical schools. Among the 52 medical colleges with five- or six-year programs, select 15 with suitable conditions to shorten the length of schooling and increase enrollment. Among the 230 intermediate health schools, select 20 with the necessary conditions and previous experience in running specialized programs to establish three-year specialized courses. Additionally, shorten the six-year program of 14 traditional Chinese medicine colleges to three or four years. The teaching policy for three-year specialized schools is to provide concise but essential basic theoretical training in the first year, followed by two years of practical, hands-on learning while treating patients. Such students may come from cities or from communes, and upon graduation, they will return to their communes, receiving work points from the commune rather than a state salary.
   (2) Continue to strengthen the training of part-time rural health workers so that production brigades have health activists capable of treating minor injuries and illnesses, assisting in childbirth, and carrying out mass health campaigns.