Chapter 581: Fight it Out

“I think that it’s a good thing that Ling Ran took the initiative to request to go on a volunteer medical consultation and that we should encourage him to do so.” During the hospital administration meeting, Huo Congjun easily raised Ling Ran’s request. As expected, everyone in the meeting gave Ling Ran the green light and decided on Bazhaixiang as the location of the volunteer medical consultation.

Ordinary doctors always tried to avoid going on volunteer medical consultations. Since Ling Ran took the initiative to request to go on one, of course, no one would stop him.

Besides, nowadays, the doctors in Yun Hua Hospital found it pointless to stop Ling Ran from doing anything.

Take the department director of the Department of Hepatobiliary and Pancreatic Surgery, He Yuanzheng, as an example. What power did he have to stop Ling Ran from doing anything?

This thought flashed across some of the doctors’ minds. Hence, they took the opportunity to look at He Yuanzheng with a smile.

He Yuanzheng’s expression did not change at all.

He was already resigned to the fact that he was oppressed, and no longer cared about it. The Department of Hepatobiliary and Pancreatic Surgery was a small department to begin with. Together with the fact that he was a young department director from another hospital, he had long since been used to being oppressed.

Of course, the thought of staging an uprising against Ling Ran had crossed his mind. However, now that he had dismissed this thought, he saw things in a different light.

The biggest difference between the department directors in hospitals and those who held positions in ordinary companies was that department directors were more free and independent.

Theoretically, after a doctor was promoted to department director, he no longer needed to care about what his colleagues think of him. Of course, department directors still needed to respect those in power such as the associate hospital director, and they had to be cautious when it came to institutional units and government organizations such as the Ministry of Health. However, they did not need to worry or care too much about what their colleagues thought of them and what their colleagues did.

All this was possible because of the uniqueness of skill-based positions.

Take He Yuanzheng who was the department director of the Department of Hepatobiliary and Pancreatic Surgery as an example. There was no way the upper management or the leaders could interfere with the way He Yuanzheng ran the department.

All they could do was mess with his department when it came to the allocation of staff members and funds. Besides, there was a difference between being a doctor and working in other industries. Most department directors were not eligible for promotion.

This was especially true when it came to chief physicians in tertiary Grade A hospitals. From the very beginning, most of them were not qualified to become the hospital director or the associate hospital director, and there was no need for those who did to pay any attention to the upper management.

The department directors did not even care that much about the allocation of funds. They usually asked for funds from the hospital, and rarely asked for any money from the government.

There were only two reasons department directors asked for funds—to purchase equipment or to invest in medical research. They mainly asked for funds to purchase equipment, and when it came to this, there was a lot of room for negotiation, to the point that the decisions were not up to one or two branch-level cadres of the Ministry of Health.

Hence, the only people department directors needed to be vigilant about were their colleagues.

There was no need for He Yuanzheng to care about how good Ling Ran was at finger replantation surgery. But he could not ignore the fact that Ling Ran was extremely good at hepatectomy.

Why were chief physicians, or even associate chief physicians from large hospitals treated with so much reverence whenever they visited smaller hospitals, to the point that the doctors in the smaller hospitals obeyed their every command?

Nowadays, He Yuanzheng was being very careful when it came to everything related to Ling Ran. He naturally would not speak up and cause other people to hate him.

Huo Congjun, too, merely glanced at He Yuanzheng. When he saw that He Yuanzheng had no intention to speak up, he nodded a little and moved on to the next topic.

The meeting was over soon.

After the meeting ended, Department Director Hong from the Respiratory Medicine Department and the department director of the General Surgery Department sought Huo Congjun out to talk about the joint volunteer medical consultation.

All departments in Yun Hua Hospital were tasked to carry out volunteer medical consultation and had to dispatch a certain number of doctors to do so every year. But not every department was equally enthusiastic about it.

Usually, the more specialized a department was, the more they disliked participating in volunteer medical consultation. On the contrary, departments that were more general were more enthusiastic when it came to volunteer medical consultation.

Even though it was carried out on a voluntary basis, the only bills the patients did not need to pay were physical examination and consultation fees.

Besides, it was more convenient for patients in villages to have doctors sent to them, as they did not need to travel. However, if the patients were to receive treatment, they still needed to pay the necessary bills.

It was also a source of patients for the departments.

Of course, tertiary Grade A hospitals that were one of the top hospitals in the area like Yun Hua Hospital never lacked patients. Moreover, most of the patients that they got via volunteer medical consultation merely suffered from ordinary illnesses. However, since volunteer medical consultation was a mandatory task, the departments had to muster up more enthusiasm for it.

The Respiratory Medicine Department and General Surgery Department were considered pretty general departments, and most of the diseases they diagnosed during volunteer medical consultations were those that they encountered on a daily basis. Since Ling Ran had volunteered himself, the department directors of these two departments thought of making up the numbers so that the task could be completed.

After a while, a chief physician from the Orthopedics Department and Chief Physician Wang Haiyang from the Hand Surgery Department came over too.

It was even more obvious that they were here to make up the numbers, and they probably intended to hand over their patients to Ling Ran.

Huo Congjun did not mind at all.

Ling Ran had no experience when it came to volunteer medical consultation, and he was young. Since Huo Congjun was not tagging along, he saw no problem in having a few senior doctors from other departments helping Ling Ran out.

Wang Haiyang from the Hand Surgery Department glanced curiously at the doorway and asked, “Department Director He, aren’t you joining us?”

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The Department of Hepatobiliary and Pancreatic Surgery did not offer many surgical methods to begin with. With Ling Ran around, they would be able to offer volunteer medical consultation to many more patients with liver and gallbladder diseases. Thus, it was only normal for He Yuanzheng to join the volunteer medical consultation.

Huo Congjun merely smiled and said nothing.

Department Director Hong from the Respiratory Medicine Department lit a cigarette. He giggled and said, “Old He probably wants to take the opportunity to carry out a few more hepatectomies.”

The doctors present cackled.

Huo Congjun coughed a few times and said, “It’s not like Ling Ran is snatching Old He’s patients. Nowadays, all the patients who are here for Ling Ran are referred to us from local hospitals.”

Larger hospitals and senior doctors had the right to be arrogant as they offer surgical methods that other hospitals or doctors were incapable of performing.

In the past, whenever the Department of Hepatobiliary and Pancreatic Surgery of provincial hospitals such as the First People’s Hospital of Wuxin City encountered patients they were unable to treat, they would straightaway refer them to hospitals in Beijing or Shanghai. They would not have referred them to Yun Hua Hospital. However, nowadays, many of the doctors recommended Ling Ran to their patients.

Given Ling Ran’s skills, this was only natural. It was also a status symbol.

“Let’s not talk about this anymore. Let’s discuss the volunteer medical consultation…” Huo Congjun never liked to talk about other people behind their backs, so he changed the topic.

The most troublesome part about a volunteer medical consultation was its administrative aspect and logistics. On the contrary, things were easier for doctors. All they had to do was to head to the location of the volunteer medical consultation in one piece and do whatever they had to do. It was just time-consuming and physically taxing.

Things were not as simple for the organizer. Aside from allocating medical staff to accompany the doctors on the volunteer medical consultation, they also had to prepare the necessary equipment and medical consumables.

Hence, they were responsible for the shipping, maintenance, and adjustment of the equipment. There was also the possibility that the equipment would suffer damage on the way. As for medical consumables, it was solely a matter of expenses. They had to try their best to avoid overspending on medical consumables, and worry that the medical consumables they bought were not enough at the same time.

The organizers were busy making preparations, and one week later, it was time for Ling Ran and the other doctors to depart.

Not only had Ling Ran used up all the hospital beds in the Emergency Department, but he had also taken up almost forty beds in the Department of Hepatobiliary and Pancreatic Surgery, Hand Surgery Department, and ICU combined.

With this number of patients, no matter how soon they would be getting discharged, it would put quite a huge pressure on the doctors-in-charge.

Ling Ran thought things through carefully and said, “Zuo Cidian, Ma Yanlin, and Zhang Anmin will be staying here. Yu Yuan and Lu Wenbin will be following me.”

Zuo Cidian was immediately drenched in cold sweat the moment he thought about how he and two other doctors would be in charge of over a hundred hospital beds. He quickly said, “How are the three of us going to manage so many patients…? Besides, Doctor Zhang needs to work for the Department and Hepatobiliary Surgery too, and Young Ma cannot be here all day.”

As Zuo Cidian said this, he had no choice but to admire Ling Ran’s capability. Among the three doctors left behind, two of them did not belong to the Emergency Department. In other words, Ling Ran was using the workforce of other departments. Even though having many patients admitted at the same time to the point that there were not enough hospital beds was something had been doing for a long time, it was still something that the doctors in his treatment group still could not stand.

“What do you think about borrowing two doctors from other treatment groups? They just need to be here for three or four days, as by then, one-third of the patients should be discharged already.” This time, not only did Ling Ran carry out hepatectomy, but he also performed cholecystectomies, Achilles tendon repairs, and finger replantations. There were also some patients in the Emergency Department who were suffering from minor ailments. If their prognoses were good, they should be able to get discharged one after another within less than a week.

However, Zuo Cidian immediately shook his head. “We can’t do that. I’m inexperienced, while Ma Yanlin and Zhang Anmin are not even from our department. We would have to obey the commands of whoever comes over.”

Even though Zuo Cidian was old, he was still a junior resident doctor. And as Ma Yanlin and Zhang Anmin were not even from the Emergency Department, their words carried even less weight.

“We can’t just depend on doctors from other treatment groups,” Zuo Cidian said in resignation, “What if we sought out two more housemen? This year’s medical interns have also been working for quite a while, so we can ask a few to help out too.”

Ling Ran said nonchalantly, “Sure, I’ll ask Department Director Huo about it.”

Ling Ran was not one to waste time. He immediately gave Huo Congjun a call.

The call set a chain reaction into motion, and soon, doctors from the Medical Affairs Department to the Medical Laboratory Department were picking up one call after another.

Among the young people who were working as housemen and medical interns in Yun Hua Hospitals, there were many who only got in through connections, and some of them were children of other doctors. Even those who did not get in through connections knew an important person or two.

However, Ling Ran was extremely renowned among these novices who had not officially become doctors.

On one hand, it was because Ling Ran’s age and skills were topics of conversation in themselves. On the other hand, it was because they were attracted by the Ling Treatment Group. Aside from treatment groups in the Orthopedics Department, it was the only treatment group where resident doctors earned more than 50,000 RMB a month.

Even those who got into the hospital through connections and children of other doctors wanted a good income and a bright future.

Before this, Ling Ran never had the intention to recruit people to join his treatment group, and Huo Congjun did not want Ling Ran to be affected by the politics of the Medical Affairs Department either.

Now that Ling Ran was opening the doors of the Ling Treatment Group to other doctors, everyone could not help but feel excited.

“Doctor Ling, Department Director Lei from the Medical Affairs Department personally gave me a call and said that he could only send me a list with three candidates tomorrow.” Zuo Cidian hung up the call with a baffled expression and reported what he heard to Ling Ran.

“Are we only getting it tomorrow? Are they short on people?”

“They probably have trouble picking the right candidates.” Zuo Cidian said tentatively, “Department Director Lei asked you if you have any special requests.”

“If I get to choose, I prefer those who can stay on for a few more days. Give priority to those who can work with us long-term.” Ling Ran did not want to let housemen or medical interns go after training them for just a few days.

Zuo Cidian flashed a wan smile when he heard that and hummed in acknowledgment. ‘Your requests make no difference at all. All right, we’ll let the housemen and medical interns fight it out.’