Shanghai takes action to meet medication demands

Shanghai pledged to guarantee the medication demand of residents through volunteer assistance, businesses gradually resuming, and cooperation between neighborhood committees and community health centers, a local health authority said at a news briefing on Saturday.

According to Wu Jinglei, director of the Shanghai Municipal Health Commission, neighborhood committees and sub-district governments are required to collect residents' requests on medication.

Volunteer teams have been built to fetch medicine from community health centers. Residents with chronic diseases are allowed to purchase medicine equal to the mount they may need for a maximum of three months.

Volunteers are also allowed to buy drugs that aren't available at community medical institutions, such as medicine for mental illness and cancer, at designated hospitals, he added.

In addition, the city has fostered logistics platforms to resume business as soon as possible to ensure medicine distribution services to be provided by 85 authorized Internet hospitals, despite of the shipping delays caused by the lockdown, he added.