Doctor Under Investigation After a Five-Year-Old's Medical Record Was Labelled 'Demanding'

A five-year-old girl went to a town health centre in Wuchuan, in Guangdong's Zhanjiang, to be treated for an allergy. Weeks later, her mother opened the child's electronic medical record and found two characters in the "past medical history" field that should not have been there: 刁蛮 — "demanding", or, closer to its register, "bratty".

The account, first reported on September 4, runs like this. The mother, surnamed Peng, was unfamiliar with the clinic's process and asked a doctor surnamed Zhang at a first-floor office a few questions. Communication broke down; when Peng said she intended to file a complaint, the doctor walked out. Called afterwards by phone, he said he was not the doctor on duty that evening, and it took the arrival of a vice-president before the girl finally got her prescription.

The health centre's early response made things worse. A vice-president confirmed the two characters had indeed been entered by the doctor, conceded the remark was wrong — and told the family the hospital had no authority to alter an electronic record, according to a report by Haibo News.

Peng took the story online, and it moved fast: by September 5 it had become one of Zhihu's most-discussed questions of the day, and the local health bureau had confirmed the facts. The bureau opened a formal investigation into the doctor, issued him a warning and criticism, ordered the record corrected, and brokered an apology and settlement with the family, CNR reported. The centre's leadership was reprimanded for failing to take responsibility when the dispute first surfaced, and a "medical ethics" rectification campaign was launched across the town's health system.

Two details kept the story burning after the apology. The first was the doctor's own explanation, cited in the Zhihu question itself: the label had been entered, he said, so that it would be convenient not to see this patient again — a note in a child's permanent file functioning as a do-not-serve flag. The second was the question's report that a local health-bureau staff member had characterized the mother's online posts as smearing the locality, a remark critics read as the institution's real instinct, with the apology extracted only once the story escaped.

Part of why this hit such a nerve is what an electronic medical record is in China: not a private note but a formal document that follows a patient across the system, and one that families had just been told could not be corrected even when everyone agreed it was wrong. It also lands in a country where disputes with hospitals already feel stacked against the individual — as in the maternal-death case that took three forensic reviews to produce three different verdicts, the worry is less one rude word than what it costs to challenge an institution that writes the file.

The record, at least, has now been amended. The investigation into the doctor remains open.