A blog post claiming that a woman slept with a doctor to get an internship at the Peking University Hospital in Shenzhen has gone viral since it first appeared on January 20. Both the woman, Miss Wang, and Dr. Guo have confessed to sleeping together at a Seven Days Inn, though the hospital insists he is actually a nurse, Xinhua reports.

A report about the blog post

News aggregation websites started picking up the blog post nine days ago, before it was eventually published by Shenzhen News. The post claims that Miss Wang used her uncle’s contacts to land the internship for RMB 100,000 and later slept with Dr. Guo, alleging that this, too, was a form of bribery. The post was full of identifying information, such as both parties’ phone numbers, the times they checked in and out of the Seven Days Inn and how much the room cost.

In a statement, the hospital claimed that both Miss Wang and Dr. Guo got their positions the legal and fair way. It also said that since both are unmarried, their behaviour outside work is not the hospital’s concern. The hospital also insists that they found no evidence that the affair was a form of bribery.

This news broke in the same week that a group of expats told Shenzhen Daily that medical services in the city need to improve. One expat has a particularly harrowing story of his experiences at the hospital in question:

American Charles Kirtley, who was suffering from a muscular disorder in 2011, said he lived in the hallways for the first few days in the hospital and that he became skeptical after being diagnosed with a nutritional deficiency. So Kirtley searched online to try to diagnose himself. “The head doctor was livid that I would try to diagnose myself when I was not a trained medical professional,” said Kirtley. “He compared my behavior to a guest telling a host how to run their private home. There seemed to be an unwavering dedication to hierarchy, but a distinct lack of devotion to genuine medical science or human empathy. Speaking of being a guest, I felt we patients were at the bottom of the hospital hierarchy.”

How does one rise up the hierarchy at this hospital?