Medical workers from the Reproductive Medicine Center of the CQHCWC [Photo/CQHCWC]

The Chongqing Health Center for Women and Children (Women and Children's Hospital of Chongqing Medical University), or CQHCWC, in Southwest China's Chongqing, got the green light to construct a municipal-level assisted reproductive medicine center, according to an announcement made by the Chongqing Municipal Health Commission on Dec 22 last year.

A total of 30 tertiary class-A (the highest in China's three-tier grading system for public hospitals) hospitals in the city participated in the review, among which 16 city-level and one regional-level clinical diagnosis and treatment center construction projects were approved. The CQHCWC was one of the two hospitals approved to build a municipal-level assistance reproductive medicine center.

The Reproductive Medicine Center of the CQHCWC is the first reproductive center in the country to be approved by the former Ministry of Health – now the National Health Commission – to carry out human-assisted reproductive technology. 

The center ranked seventh among Chinese hospitals in terms of reproductive medicine from 2017 to 2021, according to a list compiled by the Hospital Management Institute of Fudan University.

Its academic leader, Professor Huang Guoning, is the current chairman of the Reproductive Medicine Branch of the Chinese Medical Association as well as the chief medical expert of Chongqing.

Since the birth of the first "test-tube baby" in western China in 1997, the Reproductive Medicine Center of the CQHCWC has attached great importance to sci-tech innovation and offering better services to patients. It is also continuously improving its clinical and experimental technologies.

The center has been recognized as the Chongqing Reproductive Health and Infertility Medical Quality Control Center, Chongqing Reproductive Medicine Clinical Medical Research Center, and Chongqing Key Laboratory of Human Embryo Engineering, offering related training to more than 2,000 medical workers nationwide.

To date, the Reproductive Medicine Center of the CQHCWC has completed more than 110,000 assisted pregnancies and helped birth to more than 60,000 "test-tube babies". The clinical pregnancy rate is stable at over 60 percent, and its live birth rate remains at more than 50 percent–among the highest in the nation.