Xi'an Children's Hospital is packed with young patients with respiratory tract infection as heavy smog hit the city in late October. [Photo by Zhao Chen / for China Daily]

West China Women's and Children's Hospital, in Chengdu, Sichuan province, a small hospital of only 11,333 square meters, recorded 1.7 million yearly visits, mostly sick children, according to its president Mu Dezhi.

Zhu Zhu, mother of a 6-year-old boy in Beijing, compares visiting a good hospital to obtaining a train ticket during the Spring Festival peak travel season. She says the doctors are usually bad-tempered.

"When children get sick, parents are extremely anxious and worried, but it always takes at least three hours to line up outside the doctor's room. When we finally get to see the doctor, they spend less than three minutes on the child," Zhu says.

"Besides, the hospital staff members are normally very impatient and reticent."

A Beijing resident who only wants to be known as Liu Lan, says her blood boils whenever she recalls her experience in a top children's specialist hospital in Beijing.

Her son, now 6, had severe oral ulcers when he was 3, and examinations indicated abnormality in his blood. After over a year of visiting the hospital, where her son underwent a series of blood tests, a bone marrow examination, and various medication, his doctor, a top expert in children's blood diseases, discharged the boy, saying he didn't have leukemia.

Liu thought her son was cured, but soon after, the boy developed severe oral ulcers again, and blood test showed he was still ill.

"What makes me most angry is, the expert told me from the very beginning that I should have another child It is as if my son was dying.

"To see the expert, I took my son to the VIP department of the hospital. It was expensive. But she didn't even tell us the truth that she had failed to make a diagnosis," Liu says.