Healthcare

Yin Pumin in a brief article “Floating life,” outlines lacking access to healthcare as one of the key issues faced by China’s floating population.  As quoted “currently, migrant workers who have toiled in the cities for years are still not entitled to the same rights as their urban counterparts, including reproductive health and family planning services, social welfare programs such as work injury insurance and access to local education resources for their children.  In many respects Pumin is outlining precisely the intensified burden placed on families within China’s floating population.  Pumin also notes these issues are the result of the un-granted access to these resources based on the Chinese government’s household registration laws and their failure to adequately address these issues.  Especially with regards to the exceedingly vulnerable position these policies put families with children in (Pumin, 2010).  Also noted in relation to the issue of healthcare and families with children are the exceedingly strenuous work requirements for relatively menial pay, “10 hours every day for $292.80 a month” offered as comparative example (Pumin, 2010).  Pumin does add though that as of 2008 floating population service and management departments have been set up to “help migrants mingle into the society of their residence and gradually enjoy the same rights as locals (Pumin 2010).

Highly in depth research in 2011 on the “Oral Health Status of Rural–Urban Migrant Children in South China,” presents some interesting findings that may in some regards bring into question the current efficiency of such floating population service and management departments (Ligao, McGrath and Calin, 2011) (Pumin, 2010).  According to this study “the oral health of non-local born migrant children was significantly more afflicted, based on several indicators such as tooth decay, than that of the national surveys for both rural and urban local-born children”.  The more alarming statistics related to this study though, was that while 62% of the parents of these children received accurate dental hygiene information from mass media sources, 89.2% of these children had never been to a dentist (Ligao, McGrath and Calin, 2011).  Thus the results are clear, neither lacking information nor personal hygiene habits are the culprit of these concerning dental hygiene statistics.  It is the lacking access to health care services afflicting the oral healthcare of migrant children, despite the implementation of such floating population service and management departments (Ligao, McGrath and Calin, 2011) (Pumin, 2010).