Microblogging violent attacks on medical staff: A case study of the Longmen County People’s Hospital incident, an indication of a health care crisis in China

A violent attack on medical staff in Guangdong Province, in which a female doctor at Longmen County People’s Hospital (LCPH) was severely injured by a knife-wielding patient, has drawn significant public attention to the phenomenon of hospital violence and initiated discussions on how to resolve violence in hospitals. Social networking sites, such as Sina Weibo, a Chinese version of Twitter, have played a role in this public debate. The incident at LCPH provides an opportunity to examine how Weibo has been used in the debate about violence against medical staff in China. Using the Sina Weibo’s built-in search tool, we established a dataset of 661 Chinese-language micro-blogs containing the search terms: Longmen (“龙门”), doctor (“医生”), and slash (“砍”) that were posted between July 15, 2015, the date of the violent incident at LCPH, and August 15, 2015. We performed a content analysis of the micro-blogs to examine: users’ demographics, attitudes toward the injured doctor and the attacker, possible reasons for the hospital violence, and proposed measures for preventing doctors from violent incidents.

广东省发生一起针对医护人员的暴力袭击事件，龙门县人民医院（Longmen County People’s Hospital，LCPH）一名女医师遭持刀患者砍致重伤，该事件引发公众对医院暴力现象的高度关注，并催生了关于如何解决医院暴力问题的讨论。作为中国版Twitter的社交平台新浪微博（Sina Weibo）在这场公共辩论中发挥了重要作用。此次LCPH事件为探讨新浪微博如何被用于中国针对医护人员的暴力相关讨论提供了契机。通过新浪微博内置搜索工具，我们构建了一个包含661条中文微博的数据集，这批微博发布于2015年7月15日（LCPH暴力袭击事件发生当日）至2015年8月15日期间，且包含搜索关键词："龙门"、"医生"与"砍"。我们对这批微博开展了内容分析，以考察用户人口统计学特征、对受伤医师与行凶者的态度、医院暴力事件的潜在成因，以及预防医护人员遭遇暴力袭击的建议措施。