Medical and Health Care Program -
The Amity Foundation

China

The Amity Foundation is a Chinese Christian voluntary organization, promoting health, education, social service and rural development in the People's Republic of China. Founded in 1985, it is an independent Chinese voluntary organization which has received the support and encouragement of people in China and overseas, Christian and non-Christian alike. Its establishment represents a new form of Christian involvement in Chinese society.

Amity's Medical and Health Care Program emphasizes medical training for ethnic minorities and grassroots medical personnel because medical and health care services in marginalized areas are often scarce and of poor quality. Since 1989, over 8,000 village health workers have been trained at Amity organized training programs. Since the need for training village health workers in western China is still great, Amity plans to provide one and one half years of medical training for 15,000 village health workers by the year 2,000. So far one-third of the total funds needed have been raised. The cost of training one person is 3,040 yuan.

Besides the village level training, Amity also provides a six-month training program for gynecologists and surgeons from township hospitals. Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) supported Amity's first such training program in 1989. Since then the training program for township doctors has been extended to Qinghai, Gansu, Yunnan, Guizhou, Guangxi, and Sichuan Provinces.

PC(USA) has also supported 22 church-initiated hospitals and clinics, 10 homes for the aged and a kindergarten.

Amity supports two mobile medical teams to provide medical services in poor rural areas. The teams are composed of senior doctors from big urban hospitals, half of them are retired doctors. They treated over 8,000 patients in 1997.

An AIDS Education Program in the three counties in Yunnan Province Amity was begun in 1996. Three books published by the World Health Organization were translated and subsequently distributed along with pamphlets and posters. The trained volunteers go from household to household to teach the farmers about AIDS knowledge.

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