Free checkups

Wangjiang county, which is affiliated to Anqing, provided free pre-pregnancy health checkups to 2,764 married couples over the past year as part of a nationwide drive to address birth defects.

A total of 4,436 people also completed free premarital physical checkups, which means that 96.02 percent of the people who registered for marriage in the county last year underwent such examinations.

"We are providing local women and children with full-process and full-cycle health services to continuously enhance their happiness and security," Hu Ting, head of Wangjiang County Maternal and Child Health Hospital, said in a Chinese New Year message issued this month.

Zhang Jun, an ultrasound physician with Anqing Municipal Hospital's ultrasound imaging department, has a good awareness of how birthrates have changed in recent years.

"In the past, for example, of every 100 people who got married, about 50 of them planned to have children. But now, only about 20 or 30 people plan to have children."

He added that the number of checkups for a third child now accounts for only a small fraction of the total checkups.

In the eight counties affiliated to Anqing, the accuracy and efficiency of pregnancy checkups vary across community-level medical institutions.

In recent years, Zhang's ultrasound imaging department has sent medical staff to rural communities and townships for training and guidance and to boost the standardization of such screening at local medical institutions.

"The birthrate is already low. What we do is save a pregnant woman the trouble of traveling from the countryside to the city for a regular checkup," Zhang said.

This year, the department will continue promoting advanced screening technology in rural communities to improve the level of standardization.

"We need to go back to check where they have been. What we do is to enable more babies to be born healthy," Zhang said.

He Jiang and Zhang Bing contributed to this story.