Experts call for efforts to protect medical personnel's rights and improve doctor-patient relations. [Photo provided to China Daily]

Regulation and social consensus are needed to better protect the safety of medical personnel and to improve doctor-patient relations, say legislators and political advisers.

On March 8, the Chinese Medical Doctor Association and its affiliated newspaper MD Weekly held a forum for two sessions members to discuss hot topics in the health community, which has been held annually since 2009.

More than 20 deputies of China's National People's Congress and members of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference attended the forum.

The most discussed issues included how to reduce attacks on doctors and nurses and help medical professionals work with dignity, how to improve doctor-patient relations and strengthen the self-discipline among doctors and nurses, and how to amend related laws and regulations. The law on occupational physicians is to be amended this year.

In recent years, doctors and nurses sometimes became targets of violence in hospitals, either by patients or their family members. Some victims died from such attacks.

In headlines about two weeks ago, a couple was accused of beating a nurse in East China's Jiangsu province and causing her to be paralyzed, while a doctor in Chao-zhou, Guangdong province, was badly humiliated in public by a patient's family, after the patient died of alcohol intoxication in early March.