On June 28, we received a letter from Lincoln C. Chen, Chairman of the China Medical Board (CMB), saying that the proposal to the CMB Global Health Program for the project “Global Collaboration to Improve Patient Safety Management in Zimbabwe and Sierra Leone” led by Professor Chen Xiang with our university was approved after expert review by the CMB Board of Directors and hereby granted with a fund of USD 200,000. The project implementation period is from July 2018 to June 2021.

In October 2017, CMB invited certain CMB-sponsored universities and designated universities and health institutions in China to bid for "China and Global Health--Building Capacity for Overseas Work". Totally 18 universities (institutions) including Peking University, Fudan University, Zhejiang University, Peking Union Medical College and Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention were invited. CMB received a total of 25 applications. After evaluation by experts, 3 projects were finallyapproved to be funded by CMB.

This bidding was based on China's global health strategyobjectives(“Beijing Communique”, “The Belt and Road” and “The Silk Road of Health” High-Class Seminar, August 2017), aiming to equip Chinese young scholars with working experience in African or other Asian countries and according competence; with such cooperation in talent cultivation with overseas universities and relevant institutions in low-income countries for global health, Chinese medical colleges/health institutions will be enhanced in the overseas working capacities and young teachers, academics, students and health workers for global health in medical and public health fields of China could have more opportunities for overseas further education, and consequently higher ability to cope with global health issues.

For the "Global Collaboration to Improve Patient Safety Management in Zimbabwe and Sierra Leone", we will assign young scholars to well-known universities such as Yale University in USA for a short-term training, and then to public hospitals in Zimbabwe and Sierra Leone in Africa for research in patient safety management. In this way, we arm our young scholars with higher overseas working abilities in the field of global health and cultivate talents for global health.