National Cancer Center, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences

The National Cancer Center is the hospital China built to be its cancer hospital, and its own history page explains how deliberately that was done. It was founded in 1958 as the Ritan Hospital, added a cancer research institute in 1962, moved to its present site on Longtan Lake in southeast Beijing in 1983, and passed its Grade III-A review in 1996. It is the seat of the National Clinical Medical Research Centre for Malignant Tumours, of the national quality-control centre for standardised cancer diagnosis and treatment, and of a national drug clinical research centre certified by the former State Food and Drug Administration: a national specialist cancer hospital that runs basic research and clinical care under one roof.

Its clinical department index lists 24 clinical departments and 10 medical-technical departments, and its own pages carry a specialist roster of several hundred named clinicians. Two of those units are worth an international patient's attention. The Special Medical Department publishes its own staffing — three chief physicians, three doctoral supervisors, four associate chief physicians and four attending physicians — and describes how the unit works: leading specialists from across the hospital are brought in to consult, the hospital's own experts join the ward's treatment, and each patient is reviewed by that group and put on the most reasonable combined treatment plan, one step at a time. The Cancer Screening Centre on the fifth floor of the outpatient building says its predecessor was the cancer-prevention department, more than twenty years old and the earliest clinical department in China working in cancer screening, early diagnosis and early treatment as its professional direction; it publishes five screening programmes for women over 40 and for men, and states that most of its clinicians are cancer specialists with senior titles and/or master's and doctoral degrees.

What we could not confirm. The hospital's public pages name no unit for international patients. The department index lists the Special Medical Department and the Cancer Screening Centre, and the only international item on the site is an international-exchange news section. So this site records the hospital as publishing no named international unit on the pages we read — a statement about what its pages publish, not a claim that no such service exists inside the hospital. Its published switchboard is 010-67781331; anyone planning treatment here should ask which unit will see them and what language the intake staff work in, rather than assume.

How we found it. The hospital came up through the Fudan specialty reputation ranking, where it holds the first position in oncology. Its pages are in Chinese, and the record here is what those pages say.