Poisoning and Occupational Diseases Department

The Department of Occupational Diseases was established in 1964, incorporated into the Emergency Center in 2010, and renamed the Department of Poisoning and Occupational Diseases in 2013. It is a distinctive specialty of the hospital and enjoys a high profile nationally. Since its establishment, it has enjoyed a very high reputation among comparable disciplines throughout the country. It has received one National Science Conference Award and was designated a National Advanced Collective in the Occupational Disease Discipline in 1978. In the early years of the discipline, nationally renowned experts, including Professors Ma Jie, Ma Xishu, and Lin Ruicun, taught and worked here. Through decades of arduous pioneering work and effort by successive department directors, including Professors Wang Haishi and Zhang Xingguo, the department established an excellent reputation and became a leading institution in the diagnosis and treatment of poisoning and occupational diseases in Shandong Province.

The department is the principal department responsible for building the National Mobile Health Emergency Response and Disposal Center for Sudden Poisoning Incidents (Shandong) (currently, there are only two such teams nationwide, in Shandong and Guizhou), and is an important component of the National Emergency Medical Rescue Base (Shandong). In 2010, Professor Wang Haishi, as an initiator, established the Poisoning and Occupational Disease Physicians Branch of the Shandong Medical Doctors Association and was elected chairperson for its first and second terms. Director Zhang Xingguo was elected chairperson for its third and fourth terms, and our hospital is the branch’s affiliated institution. In 2023, the department took the lead in establishing the Poisoning Treatment Alliance. The alliance’s first group of member institutions included 150 hospitals from all 16 prefecture-level cities in Shandong Province and from provinces including Anhui, Guangdong, Jiangsu, and Shanxi. Professor Zhang Xingguo was elected the alliance’s first chair of the council, and our hospital is the institution to which the council chair is affiliated.

The Department of Poisoning and Occupational Diseases currently has 6 clinical physicians, including 3 chief physicians, 2 deputy chief physicians, and 1 attending physician; 1 holds a doctoral degree and 3 hold master’s degrees. It has 30 authorized beds and 13 monitored beds, and is equipped with advanced medical equipment including ventilators, hemoperfusion machines, hemofiltration machines, bedside ultrasound, fiberoptic bronchoscopes, and extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO). Since 1997, the department has continued to develop and improve, with a marked enhancement in its overall capabilities. Specializing in the treatment of acute chemical poisoning, it has achieved notable results in medical care, teaching, scientific research, occupational disease diagnosis and appraisal, and emergency response to sudden chemical poisoning incidents. It has reached a leading level in China in the treatment of acute poisonings such as organophosphate pesticide poisoning, carbon monoxide poisoning, thallium poisoning, mushroom poisoning, and paraquat poisoning. Each year, commissioned by the provincial government, it participates multiple times in province-wide emergency rescue and consultation for sudden poisoning incidents, making an important contribution to poisoning emergency response in Shandong Province. It has undertaken 4 national-level projects and 5 provincial- or ministerial-level projects, and has received 7 awards; it has served as chief editor or contributing editor of 20 monographs and published dozens of papers in SCI and core journals; in recent years, it has participated in formulating 7 poisoning-related expert consensuses.