Founded in July 1949 as the affiliated hospital of the East China Military Region People’s Medical College, Changhai Hospital, the First Affiliated Hospital of Naval Medical University, is a Grade 3, Class A general hospital with a full range of disciplines, a distinctive military character and strong overall strength. It is located in Yangpu District, Shanghai.

For more than seventy years the hospital has followed its mission of “healing the wounded and rescuing the dying, serving both the army and the people”. Through steady work and innovation it has built a group of “golden brands” centered on the treatment of burns and war and trauma injuries, diseases of the digestive and urinary systems, cardiovascular, cerebrovascular and major vascular diseases, whole-organ and hematopoietic stem cell transplantation, and the integration of Chinese and Western medicine in cancer treatment.

The main campus and the Xinjiangwan Health Check Center together cover an area of 145,800 square meters. The hospital has 65 clinical and medical technology departments and more than 2,100 open beds, receives 3.6 million outpatient and emergency visits a year, and has an average length of stay of 5.5 days, placing its efficiency and quality among the leaders in the industry. Health professionals make up 84.01% of the staff, including 2 academicians of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, 14 senior experts and professors, 8 Changjiang Scholars and young scholars, and nearly one hundred other high-level talents, forming a team “led by academicians, supported by key experts and backed by young reserves”.

Following the strategy of “strengthening the hospital through talent and research”, the hospital has 1 national clinical medical research center, 15 national key disciplines, 15 national key clinical specialties and 21 military key clinical specialties. Its gastroenterology department, led by academician Li Zhaoshen, hosts the National Clinical Research Center for Digestive Diseases. The hospital has an independent clinical research center and research ward, a first-class central laboratory, a biobank and electronic data capture system, and 11 national, provincial and ministerial research platforms. It leads 14 international multicenter studies, publishes more than 500 SCI papers a year, trains more than 18,000 people a year, and has won more than 370 national, military and Shanghai science and technology awards. Its clinical medicine ranks in the top 1‰ of the ESI global ranking. In the Fudan ranking for 2023 it is placed in the A++ tier.

In recent years the hospital has focused on specialties for war and trauma injuries and on multidisciplinary care, and built five disease centers around four discipline groups, with particular strength in the early screening, diagnosis and treatment of digestive and urological cancers and cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases. It hosts 1 national and 5 Shanghai medical quality control centers, and has been named a China Research-Oriented Hospital, a National Science Popularization Education Base, an Excellent Hospital for Improving Medical Services of the National Health Commission, a demonstration base of national advanced stroke centers, and a national and military model hospital for quality nursing. It has also been selected as a Shanghai demonstration unit for the digital transformation of “convenient medical services”, an outstanding service brand among elderly-friendly medical institutions in Shanghai, and one of the first child-friendly hospitals in Shanghai.

Carrying forward a tradition of practicing medicine with virtue, Changhai Hospital continues to innovate and to strive for high-quality development in the service of the army and the people.

Cover photo by Legolas1024, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.