Title: Authors overestimate role of barefoot doctors in China
Abstract: EDITOR,—Paul Johnstone and Isobel McConnan are right to draw readers' attention to primary care in developing countries and its relevance for our “primary care led NHS.”1 I wish to make three points.
In drawing attention to the appreciable reduction in childhood mortality in mainland China the authors overestimate the contribution that the barefoot doctors made in the late 1960s and the ‘70s (including the period of the Cultural Revolution). The …