Shanghai job fair offers 3,000 medical positions

A job fair in Shanghai offered nearly 3,000 positions to medical workers on Sunday, aiming to deepen the city's talent pool and ensure public health safety.

Many applicants, mostly students who graduated from medical school this year, said they had been inspired by the selfless dedication shown by doctors and nurses during the novel coronavirus outbreak over the past few months and hoped to follow their example and contribute to public health.

Fifty-one medical institutions, including top hospitals, those specializing in traditional Chinese medicine, community health centers and city-and district-level disease control centers, offered jobs at the fair for doctors, nurses, technicians, pharmacists and scientists.

The Shanghai Public Health Clinical Center, where confirmed COVID-19 cases are treated in the municipality, was one of them. It said the line of applicants waiting to submit their resumes was related to Shanghai's excellent performance in curbing the spread of the virus and treating cases.

This year, more applicants were medical graduates from outside Shanghai, and they showed greater interest in positions at institutions specializing in the prevention and treatment of infectious diseases, said Hui Jingjing, a human resources manager at the center.

"Front-line Shanghai medical experts' hands-on treatment solutions for COVID-19 patients were spread in medical circles around the world, and a book integrating their experience and comprehensive understanding of the pandemic has been published in Chinese and three foreign languages," Hui said. "Many young graduates aspired to join this team with pride."

The number of jobs offered to doctors, nurses and researchers focusing on viruses and infectious diseases was almost double that of last year. Ninety jobs alone were offered to nurses.

"The increased need was also driven by Shanghai's goal of becoming one of the world's safest cities in public health by 2025," Hui said.

Li Chengang, who has a master's degree from a medical school in Jiangxi province, submitted his resume to the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Center. He wants to become an anesthetist.

He said that because most patients at the center had infectious diseases, that gave the work special social significance, which appealed to him.

"I won't be afraid of my own safety there as I believe the center will abide by standards and strict infection control within the hospital to best protect the medical staff and patients," Li said.

The city's disease control centers also increased the number of vacancies for specialists in infectious disease prevention and control and laboratory professionals.

The Shanghai Municipal Center for Disease Control and Prevention plans to hire 111 specialists for such positions, roughly double the number of jobs offered last year.

"It's partly because the COVID-19 epidemic is still lingering," said Liu Yanhui, head of recruitment at the Shanghai CDC. "It's also because we wanted to provide more job positions for graduates to cope with employment pressure this year."

Peng Xiaojun, who majored in nursing at Anqing Medical College in Anhui province, was looking for a job as a pediatric nurse.

"Nurses accounted for nearly 70 percent of the medical workers dispatched from all over the country to Hubei province, a region hit hard by the outbreak, to give support during the peak of the COVID-19 epidemic in the country," she said. "I was very much inspired and am eager to join such a brave team."