The Ruijin Hospital National Emergency Medical Center broke ground on Monday, setting a new paradigm for emergency medical response in the megacity.

The center will incorporate rescue helicopters as part of an integrated system mobilizing resources from air, land and sea to prepare for sudden emergencies and major public health events.

Ruijin Hospital said construction of the facility, which will be Shanghai's only national-level emergency medical center, is designed to meet world-class standards. The center is scheduled to be completed by June 2028.

Once finished, the Huangpu campus of Ruijin Hospital in downtown Shanghai will house a modern medical rescue complex spanning an area of more than 73,000 square meters. The facility will have a planned capacity of 600 beds and will feature a comprehensive emergency treatment building, a multimodal medical technology platform and an intelligent transfer system. An aerial corridor will connect various functional units, providing infrastructure for three-dimensional rescue operations.

The emergency medical center will integrate resources from multiple hospital departments, including emergency medicine, critical care, burns and infectious diseases, to create a comprehensive, end-to-end medical rescue system, according to Ruijin Hospital.

The center will also feature seven specialized units focused on matters such as talent training, patient transfer and warehouse distribution, the hospital said.

Ning Guang, president of Ruijin Hospital, said that in addition to the Huangpu complex, which will specialize in treating severe trauma and infectious diseases, two similar centers will be built at the hospital's campuses in suburban Jiading and Jinshan districts. The Jiading site will focus on infectious diseases and traffic injuries, while the Jinshan center will specialize in nuclear injury treatment.

The latter two facilities will also extend their coverage to neighboring Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces, said Ning, who is also an academician with the Chinese Academy of Engineering.

"Leveraging the established land, sea and air integrated transfer system at Ruijin Hospital, the initiative aims to achieve high-speed coordination among the facilities, building a tiered and graded emergency medical rescue network covering Shanghai and the entire Yangtze River Delta region," he said.

Over the past few years, national emergency medical rescue bases have begun construction in more than 10 cities, including Beijing, Changsha in Hunan province, Chengdu in Sichuan province and Nanchang in Jiangxi province, as part of the efforts to strengthen emergency medical response capabilities in the country.

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