Microblogging violent attacks on medical staff: A case study of the Longmen County People’s Hospital incident, an indication of a health care crisis in China

<p>A violent attack on medical staff in Guangdong Province, in which a female doctor at Longmen County People&rsquo;s Hospital (LCPH) was severely injured by a knife-wielding patient, has drawn significant public attention to the phenomenon of hospital violence and initiated discussions on how to resolve violence in hospitals. Social networking sites, such as Sina Weibo, a Chinese version of Twitter, have played a role in this public debate. The incident at LCPH provides an opportunity to examine how Weibo has been used in the debate about violence against medical staff in China.&nbsp;Using the Sina Weibo&rsquo;s built-in search tool, we established a dataset of 661 Chinese-language micro-blogs containing the search terms: Longmen (&ldquo;龙门&rdquo;), doctor (&ldquo;医生&rdquo;), and slash (&ldquo;砍&rdquo;) that were posted between July 15, 2015, the date of the violent incident at LCPH, and August 15, 2015. We performed a content analysis of the micro-blogs to examine: users&rsquo; demographics, attitudes toward the injured doctor and the attacker, possible reasons for the hospital violence, and proposed measures for preventing doctors from violent incidents.&nbsp;</p>