The latest in a long line of acts of violence against hospital staff in China has taken place in Foshan. A man, claiming to be the husband of a woman who was fatally stabbed the night before, beat up a doctor at Baini Town Huali Hospital in Sanshui District early on Monday (Nov. 4), giving him severe concussion. The man then tore through the hospital smashing equipment for over an hour, Southern Metropolis Daily reports.

A 22 year-old Hubei woman was stabbed 14 times in Baini Town the previous night and paramedics arrived within 15 minutes of being called. She was pronounced dead at the scene. The stabbing took place just outside her rented home in Xiangcun Village at around 9 p.m. Neighbours say they saw her walk into a dark alley with a young man who was wearing a hat and heard screams.

Xu Baozhang recovering in hospital, image courtesy of Sina Weibo

As soon as the screams were heard, security guards rushed to the scene and called an ambulance when they found her lying motionless. The attacker has not yet been found.

Xu Baozhang, the deputy director of Baini Town Huali Hospital’s outpatient department, says she had been stabbed in the neck, chest and abdomen.

According to Xu, her corpse was moved from the hospital’s morgue to the local funeral parlour, in keeping with its policy as a private hospital. Then at 3:40 a.m., there was a banging at the door of Xu’s office. A man burst in and shouted: “Where did my woman’s corpse go? I want to kill you!” Before he could react, Xu was hit in the head with a ceramic cup and then kicked repeatedly in the head.

“I have never seen anything like it in my 20 years as a doctor,” Xu told media.

According to nurses and security guards, the man then tore through the hospital, smashing up bulletin boards, computers, chairs and windows before finally being subdued by police at 4:50 a.m. He had loudly (and wrongly) claimed that paramedics had taken half an hour to arrive at the scene of the stabbing.

Xu is suffering from a severe concussion and has two stitches in his head.

A huge clean-up operation needs to be done on floors 1-3 of the hospital and the murder that caused the whole thing still needs to be investigated.

National-level authorities have been called in to deal with the problem of acts of violence against medical staff.

Protestors in their lab coats ask citizens to “Reciprocate our respect” and “Protest justice” in Wenling City, Zhejiang. Image courtesy of The Guardian

Several hundred hospital staff staged a rare protest in Zhejiang Province against attacks on medical workers after a patient stabbed three doctors, killing one of them.

Shenzhen Daily reported yesterday that many local hospital administrators said most violent incidents at hospitals happen because patients have excessively high expectations for medical services.

As of the end of September, Guangdong Province’s medical dispute mediation committee had received 2,995 cases involving disputes at hospitals and medical organizations in the province. Medical staff had been injured in more than 30 percent of the cases. The committee was founded in 2011.