First Hospital of Lanzhou University

The group visiting one of the wards

Outside an operating room

The entrance to an operating room

The entrance to the inpatient building

This afternoon we visited the First Hospital of Lanzhou University. The Hospital has an 23-storey inpatient building with over 800 beds and 18 operating rooms. The Hospital first opened in 1948 as the Medicine College of Lanzhou University. A lot of the equipment in the hospital comes from the U.S. The key areas of this hospital are cardiovascular surgery, blood diagnosis, general surgery, and obstetrics. Gansu has a high incidence rate of Congenital Heart Disease (nearly 8%) and since 1998 medical teams from other countries have been sent by an international charitable organization, Children's Heartlink, to work with the Cardiovascular Surgery Department. While visiting the hospital we met a 3 year-old who is due to leave the hospital tomorrow after a heart operation.