Anyone who calls him “Dr. Yan” gets help, as far as Dr. Yan Zheng is concerned. Having been trained in the early 2000s during Shanghai’s family doctor pilot program, he is one of the city’s first certified general practitioners, and he likes to make sure there is a personal touch as he divides his time between clinic work and home visits.

“Family doctors are like family friends,” Dr. Yan tells Sixth Tone.

Dr. Yan is one of over 7,000 certified family doctors who pay house calls to provide diagnosis, rehab advice, and family-planning guidance at the community level. Spurred by Shanghai’s citywide Family Doctor Program launched in 2011, he is part of a flagship civil service effort to alleviate crowds in larger hospitals and shift primary care to the community level among key groups, such as the elderly, children, the disabled, and those with chronic illnesses.

These doctors are key to reforming China’s tiered health care system, where 80% medical resources are clustered in cities and rural clinics lack personnel. As it stands, patients often trek cross-region to larger hospitals — which tend to be equated with better care — for even a simple cough.

Shanghai’s health program is working to foster trust in communities and shift the health care burden off hospitals and into the grassroots level. As of May 2025, more than 11 million residents — 45% of Shanghai’s population — had enrolled in the programme, with coverage exceeding 84% among seniors and patients with chronic conditions.

Yet despite the program’s lofty goals and benefits on offer, challenges remain. People are still slow to trust community clinics and default to lining up at big hospitals for prestigious specialists.

The system still needs time to mature, as far as Dr. Yan is concerned. Yet for him, it all comes down to trust and advancing better health care one patient, one doorstep, at a time.

“We want residents to learn more about us and sign up with a family doctor,” Dr. Yan says. “They’ll get better care.”