Barefoot Doctors Program

A rural primary health care program of the People's Republic of China, formalized nationwide from 1968, that trained hundreds of thousands of farmers and other rural residents in basic preventive and curative medicine, immunization, first aid, and family planning, so they could work part-time as paramedical health workers in their own villages, largely without access to formally trained physicians. Barefoot doctors, so called because many continued farming and worked without shoes in the paddy fields, combined elements of Western and traditional Chinese medicine and were paid partly through their home agricultural collective. Health economists and the World Health Organization have credited the program with major gains in rural Chinese life expectancy and with helping inspire WHO's 1978 Alma-Ata Declaration on primary health care and community health workers as a global model. The formal barefoot doctor title was phased out during China's market reforms of the early 1980s, as the rural collectives that had funded and organized the system were dismantled, and rural China moved toward a licensed village-doctor system instead.