Tianjin is a city that is 13 Swedish mil from Beijing in one of the most expansive parts of China, and has 13.5 million inhabitants. I am responsible for building up a partnership with Tianjin Medical University and worked for three weeks in October with the help of funds from the Linnaeus- Palme program.

This was the third time I was there and taught and discussed the continued work to develop the partnership even more. There is a lot of interest from both sides to create a strong partnership between our institutions, which is very stimulating. The plan is that this collaboration will be far reaching and will take place on many levels, both a continuing teacher and student exchange at an undergraduate level, but also at an advanced and research level.

I was one of the supervisors for the first student who received a PhD in nursing at Tianjin Medical University, PhD Xiao-Ying Zang. At the end of this year another two of the teachers, Qi Lu and Lan Wang will be enrolled at the research school, School of Health Sciences, Jönköping University with me as the main supervisor. Their research will address COPD and stroke, but we discuss the possibility also to cooperate in the cardiovascular field in the future.

At a visit to Tianjin Medical Hospital I had the opportunity to see their cardiac clinic and talk with the head nurse and she was very interested to learn more about how we work, etc. Among others we decided that next year (for it will be at least three weeks next year too)  I will give lectures for the nurses at the hospital and not only at the university. There is a lot of similarities, but of course also a lot of differences in how we treat and follow-up our patients. For example, team-based and person-centered care is not common. China is the only country in the world where there are more doctors than nurses (RNs 0.9 per doctor), which of course makes its mark in the nursing care.

Jan Mårtensson