The PLA 281 Hospital is part of the Beijing Military Command Beidaihe system of nursing homes, along with the PLA 178 Hospital and the Navy Beidaihe nursing home. At one point, it performed the most kidney transplants in the Beijing Military Command and in Hebei Province.612

This hospital started performing kidney transplants in the 1970s and completed its first allogeneic kidney transplant in 1987.613 As of 2007, the hospital has performed 6 to 9 simultaneous kidney transplants on 28 occasions.614

Its 40-bed kidney transplant center has 30 medical personnel, including 4 chief and associate chief physicians and 4 attending physicians with doctoral or master’s degrees. It has published more than 150 papers in medical journals at home and abroad.

The center receives patients from around the country. The youngest recipient was 9 years old; the oldest was 75.615

Director Yang Guangting is a member of the Beijing Military Command’s Department of Urology Professional Committee and a standing member of the Qinhuangdao Urology Professional Committee. He has a wealth of clinical experience in kidney transplantation and has won a first prize Qinhuangdao City Technological Progress Award.616

Pei Xiangke, the center’s deputy director, trained under Shi Bingyi at the PLA Organ Transplant Center.617

The center performs kidney procurements and tissue matching at an alarming rate. On January 28, 2002, this unit undertook seven cadaveric renal allografts. One patient experienced a renal arterial embolization seven days after surgery, on February 4, 2002. The next day, the patient was administered a “transplant nephrectomy and in situ re-transplantation.” In other words, the wait time for the second transplant, including organ sourcing and tissue matching, took only one day.618