This hospital was founded in 1883. For five years in a row, it ranked among the top 50 hospitals in China. It has almost 3,000 beds and 706 senior chief and deputy specialists. The hospital includes multiple provincial and ministerial-level key disciplines and key disciplines in clinical medicine. It has 42 master’s, doctoral, and postdoctoral research stations.153
The hospital carried out the first kidney transplant in Jiangsu Province in 1978. The Urologic Surgery Department has a kidney transplant center with 55 beds, 130 monthly admissions/discharges, and a 101% turnover rate.154 Professor Hou Jianquan, its PhD advisor, claimed that the hospital’s kidney transplant capabilities are leading domestically. By 2012, it had performed over 1,170 renal transplants (the claim of less than 100 cases per year seems clearly understated, because that would require no more than 10 beds).155
The department is a key clinical specialist center of Suzhou City and Jiangsu Province and offers master’s and PhD degree programs. It currently has two doctoral advisors and 5 master’s advisors. It has established academic exchange and collaborative relationships with countries including the United States, Britain, Japan and Switzerland. The department has received 1.45 million RMB in research funding and 14 ministerial and provincial awards. It has published 14 monographs and 74 academic papers.
Its director Yan Chunyin has studied at the University of Manchester and the University of Zurich. He is a PhD advisor and vice chairman of the Organ Transplantation Professional Association of the Jiangsu Branch of the Chinese Medical Association. He conducted in-depth research in areas including kidney transplantation. He received the Suzhou Municipal Science and Technology Award for his experimental and clinical studies of “long-term survival and induction of the formation of immune tolerance in kidney transplantation.” He is currently involved in a number of provincial and ministerial-level research projects.156
The Heart and Great Vessels Surgical Department was the first one to begin to conduct orthotropic heart transplants in 2000 in Jianshu Province. This department is a provincial key discipline of medical science and a national key discipline for clinical medicine.157
Shen Zhenya, the director of the Cardiovascular Surgery Department, in May 2014 said, “We have [organ transplants] every month. Once you come, I think you should be able to find an organ donor in a little over two weeks. The donors who practice Falun Gong…we have too.” 158