As of December 2014, this nationally renowned 3A hospital had 5 postdoctoral fellows, 95 PhDs, 433 personnel with master’s degrees, and 419 with senior professional titles. Currently, it has 1,903 beds.135
Its lung transplant center claims to be among the top three in the world,136 and claims to have completed more than half of all lung transplant surgeries in the country.137 It is a key clinical discipline and serves as the lung transplant treatment center in Jiangsu Province. It is a nationally registered lung transplant data management unit and owns a key provincial laboratory for transplantation. Its lung transplant team consists of three chief surgeons, two associate chief surgeons, one doctoral advisor, three master’s advisors, and many staff members holding doctoral or master’s degrees.
In September 2002, Chen Jingyu returned to the hospital’s lung transplant center in the thoracic surgery department after finishing advanced study at the lung transplant center of Toronto General Hospital. His team performed the country’s first lung transplantation for the treatment of emphysema and has since performed single-lung, double-lung, and heart-lung transplants. It claims to have performed the most lung transplants nationwide as of December 2007 and has set nine records in Asia and China.138 Chen is thus renowned as the “No. 1 Lung Transplant Surgeon in China.”
As reported in July 2014, Chen Jingyu’s team often completed four or five lung transplants a day. He led his team to spread its advanced techniques to thirty 3A hospitals in more than ten cities and provinces, including Beijing, Guangzhou, Nanjing, Hangzhou, Wuhan, and Jilin.139 A new era of lung transplantation in China has begun. Chen’s team has filled in many gaps in this area.140
Chen also developed pulmonary perfusion preservation solutions, which prolong lung retention time from four to six hours to nearly eight hours, reaching an internationally advanced level and taking the lead in China. In the past five years, this center has won many medical, science, and technology awards. It has published more than 50 papers on lung transplantation in core national journals, including in SCI, and translated the monograph Lung Transplantation.
On August 13th, 2015, Chen remarked on his Sina Weibo, “Originally I thought the number of available donor lungs would decrease, since the practice of using death row prisoners as donors has been abolished. However, who would have thought that we are even busier than last year. Now we perform one lung transplant every three days.”
Chen’s lung transplant center was destined to become even busier, as indicated by his Weibo message at the end of October: “Good morning! Our team started to work at 5:00 am. We again use an airplane to deliver the donor lung. In October, we have been continuously conducting lung transplants from the 1st to the end, and have set a new record in the number of transplants done in a single month…”