Seeing a doctor in Shanghai

The choice, in one table

Public hospitals: you can usually walk in, registration at a municipal hospital costs a couple of euros, and your passport is all the ID you need — first visit gets you a medical record card. The trade-offs are queues, less availability of imported medicines, and language that varies by department.

Private and foreign-invested hospitals: appointment-based, multilingual by design, several hundred yuan and up just to be seen. But note one thing people get wrong — most private hospitals do not run a standard emergency department. For a real emergency, a public hospital is the right destination, not the expensive one.

Both accept international insurance, and many maintain direct-billing arrangements. Check whether your insurer is on the specific hospital’s list before you go, not after.

The one link worth bookmarking

Shanghai’s government publishes an English directory of hospitals with international or VIP departments — dozens of them, sorted by district, each entry giving the floor and door number of the international desk, its phone and email, the languages spoken, opening hours, and the list of insurers it bills directly.

It is the single most useful page on the subject and almost nobody links to it. We are not going to reproduce it here — hospital departments move, and a stale copy is worse than none. Go to the source, linked below.

Booking, paying, and the app you already have

Appointments at public hospitals run through Shanghai’s city-services app (Suishenban), which registers with a passport. Phone booking and simply turning up in person also work. Note this is a different system from accommodation registration, which goes through the police portal.

Bring your passport, your insurance details, and any relevant history from home. Payment is at the hospital; reimbursement is between you and your insurer unless direct billing is in place.

Coming to Shanghai specifically for treatment

This is now common enough that the city reports it: foreign patient numbers at Shanghai’s public hospitals ran into the tens of thousands in 2025, and the government has expanded a medical-tourism pilot across more than twenty public hospitals. Officials have noted that many international patients arrive on the 240-hour visa-free transit rule rather than a dedicated visa.

If that is your trip, the practical questions become accommodation questions: a treatment course runs weeks rather than nights, someone usually travels with the patient, and the big specialist centres are not always near a metro station. A serviced apartment with a kitchen, close to the hospital, beats a hotel by a distance — that is the kind of stay this site exists to find.