Health-care professional just loves it here
“Shanghai is a fantastic place to live in and it’s also grown up a lot, compared with when I lived here 20 years ago,” said Elisabeth Staudinger, president of Siemens Healthineers Asia Pacific.
For her, it’s not just a place to live and work in but a place to enjoy.
“Shanghai has become a very livable city. Besides the fantastic food, which comes from any part of the world or the country, I also really like the cultural opportunity. There are so many places that you can go and where you can experience something else — more than just earn your money,” she added.
Elisabeth Staudinger, president of Siemens Healthineers Asia Pacific, shows an example of her calligraphy. The Chinese character fu is mostly seen during Spring Festival signifying happiness to come.
Staudinger, who is from Austria, is an avid fan of Chinese culture, and has been learning Chinese for more than 20 years. She can now communicate with local colleagues easily in Chinese. More surprisingly, she is also good at calligraphy.
She said the more she learned, the more she became interested. The years of learning Chinese has also paid her back.
“Being able to read the characters, particularly, gives me a totally different level of access to the country and the people," she said.
When asked some advice on learning Chinese, Staudinger said there is no easy solution to that.
“Certain things are simple, such as grammar, not as complicated as German. But if you really want to learn Chinese, you should learn characters. To learn characters, there are a lot of disciplines, there is no easy way, you have to sit down to practice and to remember.”
Staudinger shared her vision on the latest trends in the health-care industry as a professional in the sector.
For instance, Siemens Healthineers is looking at ways of how to enable hospitals and doctors to deliver more personalized care to patients. The company is also exploring changing the ways care is delivered and how patients are treated, such as by applying remote technology and robotics.
It is also focusing on improving patient experience, a comparatively new topic in China.
“It’s not just you see a doctor, you spend two minutes, then you go out again. It makes a difference for the quality of care, and how the patient feels as they go through the treatment.”
The last, and maybe the biggest and the most fundamental new trend for the health-care business is digitalization. Health-care is becoming digital in many ways, she said.
Elisabeth Staudinger receives a paper-cutting work by local artist Li Shoubai as a gift to celebrate the Chinese New Year. The gift is sent by the Shanghai People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries to some senior executives of renowned multinational companies in Shanghai.
