This hospital was established in 1898 as the first hospital practicing Western medicine in Hunan Province. It serves as a training base for master’s degree students, an experimental base for continuing education for several universities, and a training base for national residency standardization. It is a National Natural Science Foundation support unit and a nationally designated clinical drug trial institution. It has over 2,200 open beds, 434 personnel with senior and associate senior titles, and 438 intermediate-level professional personnel.³²⁸

In 1994, the hospital became one of the earliest in Hunan Province to start performing kidney transplants. It claims to perform the most transplants in the province, and its relative-donor kidney transplantation capability assumes a leading role in the country.

Its current website no longer lists the Urologic Transplant Department. However, the introduction to Urology Ward No. 2 shows its predecessor as the Urologic Transplant Department and claims that the key medical professionals have many years of experience in renal transplantation as routine procedures, and its mature technology in kidney transplantation reflects the highest standards of urology. It has 24 staff members, including a chief physician, a deputy chief physician, 3 physicians with master’s degrees, two attending physicians, two head nurses and 3 senior nurses.³²⁹

Its website reported the hospital has completed only nearly 1,000 kidney transplants in the past ten years. In addition, the profile of expert Zhu Huachen, director of organ transplantation, had all of its content removed, with only a photo remaining. In a national ranking of recommended public hospital doctors (http://m.120bst.com/), Zhu was ranked fourth among kidney transplant surgeons in Hunan Province.³³⁰

Zhou Jianhui, director of urology and an adjunct professor at Xiangya Hospital, has worked in this field for more than 30 years. He studied at the Institute of Urology, Peking University First Hospital, and Nanfang Hospital. In 1996, he successfully completed the first allogeneic kidney transplant in Hunan Province at a municipal hospital.³³¹

According to the hospital’s website, the following quality transplant services are provided:³³²

1. Maximum reduction of hospitalization costs for the patient; the average cost for a kidney transplant between family members is about 60,000 RMB with no complications, or about 80,000 RMB from a cadaveric donor.
2. Strict donor and recipient tissue compatibility and cross-matching, to guarantee maximum survival time of the donor organ and the recipient.
3. Strict control of warm and cold ischemia times of the donor organ.
4. Strengthened detection of AIDS virus (HIV), various hepatitis viruses, syphilis and other infectious diseases in the donor organ.

In addition to kidney transplants, its treatment techniques for heart, liver, and other types of transplants have also reached an advanced level in the province and nationwide.³³³ It started performing liver transplants in 2001³³⁴ and heart transplants in 2004.³³⁵ It performs corneal transplants as a routine procedure and has sufficient sources of corneas. Its corneal transplantation leads the province.³³⁶