Community service worker in Wuhan helps residents buy medicine

Feng Feng, a community service worker in Huiminyuan community in Wuhan City, central China's Hubei Province, carries bags of medicine on his body, which he buys for the residents. /Xinhua

Photos of a community service worker carrying dozens of bags of medicine on him in Wuhan, central China's Hubei Province, the epicenter of COVID-19, has gone viral on Chinese social media. It has brought people's attention to those community staff workers who have been braving the contamination risks to work in the frontline and help residents get the supplies they need amid the epidemic outbreak.

The man captured in the photo is Feng Feng, a community service worker in the Huiminyuan community in Jiang'an District, Wuhan. He helps residents with chronic diseases in the community by going out to buy medicine they need.

In 2019, authorities in Wuhan divided the city into different zones. Each zone has 300 to 500 families or 1,000 permanent residents and is equipped with one community service worker. Since the outbreak, especially after the city's lockdown, these community service workers took up the responsibility of buying needed medicine.

Feng Feng, a community service worker, helps residents in the community to buy medicine at the pharmacy in Wuhan, central China's Hubei Province. /Xinhua

The community that Feng is responsible for has more than 600 residents. He started helping its residents at the beginning of February. So far, he helped more than 200 residents.

On February 24, he headed to the local pharmacy with his colleagues to get the prescriptions. However, there were too many bags and the suitcases they had weren't big enough.

That's when he thought of carrying the bags on him, a moment recorded by his colleague.

Since there are too many bags of medicine, Feng comes up with the idea of carrying the medicine bags on his body. /Changjiang Daily

Getting prescriptions for residents is not an easy task. Feng needs to confirm every patient's demands in advance and creates a detailed list, including each person's health insurance card number and password, as he needs to pay for the medicine using these cards.

At the pharmacy, he delivers the list and the patient's medical records to the staff. After he gets the prescriptions, he needs to sort them out and pack each patient's medicine into separate bags. When he returns to the community, he double-checks the bag contents with each of those residents, before calling them to collect their medicine.

For those unable to pick up their medicine, Feng asks other service workers to deliver it to the doorway.

Feng said getting prescriptions is a really important task and it must be done very carefully. "Everyone who asks me to help buy medicine will receive at least two phone calls from me," said Feng. "One is to collect the information and the other one is to notify them and to double-check."