A doctor who travels through two eras

Chapter 20 Should I go to the Purchasing Department?

Obviously, no one who can be a leader is a simple character, so Dean Shen smiled and looked at Lin Sanqi again:
"Comrade Lin Sanqi, since you are taking over your mother's position and your mother doesn't want you to work too hard, why don't you go to the hospital library? Usually you just need to clean up, organize books, and register for borrowing. This job is not that hard."

Lin Kucan and Jin Caifeng were delighted when they heard this. This library is great, it is sheltered from the wind and rain, and no one would notice if they took a nap inside.

These days, it’s all fixed salary, no matter how much you work.

But Lin Sanqi refused to do it.

Being a librarian? I don’t dare to take such an awesome position, because that’s the starting point of great people.

Moreover, as a librarian, I have to work from nine to five every day and don't even have a chance to earn extra money. How can I get rich from traveling through the golden finger?

Did I travel through time and space just to receive a salary of more than 30 yuan a month?
Are you kidding me?
Lin Sanqi made up his mind that he would never do such a job with no pursuit, no future and no passion.

"Dean Shen, dad, mom, I don't want to work in the library. You know I've been wandering around for ten years, and my mind has long been wild. I can't do this job of sitting there facing books every day!"

Jin Caifeng was unhappy. This was a good job that she had exchanged for her retirement. How could she just give it up?

"You kid, this is a great job that others can't even ask for. Listen to your mother and let's go to the library."

Dean Shen also frowned, thinking that the youngest son of the Lin family was a little troublemaker. He had to obey the organization's arrangements on what position to take, so how could he be picky?

"Comrade Lin Sanqi, we are all bricks of the revolution. We should go wherever the organization needs us to go. We should still obey the organization's arrangements."

Lin Sanqi was also a little embarrassed, so he scratched his head:
"Dean, I, I just want to know if there is a job with more freedom, where I can run around outside all day. Anyway, I am still young, so how can I retire in the library?"

Well, this statement seems to make sense!

Dean Shen thought to himself that he might have wrongly blamed the boy from the Lin family, so he smiled again:

"Young comrade, you have a pretty good ideological consciousness. If you really want to go out, there is a good job. Why don't you go to the purchasing department?"

"Purchasing Department?"

Lin Kucan and Jin Caifeng are insiders in the industry, so they were the first to frown when they heard about going to the purchasing department, but Lin Sanqi's eyes lit up when he heard it.

Not only do enterprises have purchasing and supply and marketing departments, but hospitals also have purchasing departments. This should be a feature of the 1950s and 1960s.

Before liberation, the procurement channels of major Chinese medicine clinics and medicine shops in the country were controlled by a small number of wholesalers.

After all, Chinese medicine clinics and drug stores are private workshops, and the amount used will not be too much. It is impossible for them to send people to purchase hundreds of Chinese medicinal materials themselves.

After liberation, all private wholesalers and businesses were dissolved, which meant that the industrial chain of traditional Chinese medicine from the field to the hospital was broken, and the wholesalers in the middle disappeared.

The country was newly established and there was a lot of work to be done. In addition, medicinal materials and agricultural and sideline products were similar, so there was temporarily a supply and marketing system responsible for acting as "wholesalers".

The operating model is that the supply and marketing cooperatives place purchase orders with farmers or herbal farmers, collect them like vegetables and radishes, and then the traditional Chinese medicine hospitals purchase them from the supply and marketing cooperatives.

But there is another problem here.

Medicine and pharmacy are highly professional professions.

The processing, storage, and transportation of Chinese herbal medicines all require the care of professionals. Ordinary supply and marketing staff simply do not know how to handle them, resulting in very poor quality of Chinese herbal medicines. Another problem is the grading of Chinese herbal medicines.

The same medicinal material can be divided into good and bad grades. Chinese medicinal materials are divided into five levels: special grade, first grade, second grade, third grade and fourth grade.

Each grade has corresponding standards, and the efficacy and price are also completely different. If grading and identification are required, professionals are also needed.

But the staff of the supply and marketing cooperative didn't care about that. They packed everything into sacks, whether it was special grade or fourth grade, and took it away.

This also means that after the Chinese medicinal materials are sold to hospitals, the hospitals have to spend a lot of time and manpower to classify and re-prepare them, but the consumption and losses involved have to be borne by the hospitals themselves.

You can't expect unprofessional people to have much sense of responsibility, right?
If it's just a matter of responsibility, it's okay, at least you can still buy the herbs.

Like the Chinese medicine shops before liberation, the stock of Chinese medicinal materials generally ranged from 300 to 500 kinds.

After liberation, top hospitals like Kuanjie Chinese Medicine Hospital needed a wide range of medicinal materials, about 700 kinds, because the doctors used many secret recipes.

The National Supply and Marketing Cooperatives only sells 105 varieties of medicinal materials. Not only are the varieties few and the quality poor, but there is also a problem with quantity.

The supply and marketing cooperatives purchase from farmers based on specific targets: if they want 1000 kilograms, they will buy 1000 kilograms, not a kilogram more.

But this is not the case in clinical practice. The number of patients increases and decreases dynamically and randomly.

Perhaps one thousand kilograms of a certain medicinal material is enough this year, but next year there will be more patients and the clinical usage will increase. The hospital will need two thousand kilograms, but the supply and marketing cooperative can only provide one thousand kilograms, and the rest will be a gap, which creates a contradiction.

At the same time, Chinese medicinal materials are small local products with diverse varieties and strong regional characteristics, and are distributed throughout the country.

Compared with bulk agricultural products such as grain, oil, and cotton, they have small economic value, scattered production areas, poor substitutability, complex procurement, and often require long-distance cross-regional trade.

The supply and marketing cooperatives have to manage all the goods in the country. How can they have the time and manpower to serve your hospital? You use as much as you are given. They don't have time to deal with you.

It’s embarrassing that the hospital has no medicine.

A famous Chinese doctor wrote out a prescription, but it was missing this medicine and that medicine. How could he treat the patient?

For some special prescriptions, missing one ingredient can make a huge difference in the effect.

The government has no good solution to this contradiction between supply and demand. After all, the supply and marketing cooperatives are too large and are responsible for the circulation of commodities in an entire country.

There were also pharmaceutical companies in the 1950s, but these companies mainly dealt with Western medicine and medical devices, and did not involve traditional Chinese medicine.

How to do?
In philosophical terms: a contradiction arose between the people's growing material and cultural needs and the backward social production.

So the superiors came up with a policy: opening a free market for medicinal materials.

That is, your traditional Chinese medicine hospital can purchase the Chinese medicinal materials you need in the name of the hospital, and you can place purchase orders directly with various herbal farmers' cooperatives and local supply and marketing cooperatives.

Of course, it is not completely free. You can only use public to public, not public to private, or private to private.

Thus, the hospital’s “Purchasing Department” was established.

(End of this chapter)