BEIJING, Dec. 25 (Xinhua) -- A total of 14,976 cases of medical disputes were handled by the country's emerging third-party mediation organizations, with over 80 percent of them being successfully settled, said Vice Health Minister Zhang Mao.

Zhang told Xinhua recently in an exclusive interview that China has to date set up 1,358 third-party mediation organizations to settle medical disputes.

The third-party mediation organizations have come into being since late 2009 which usually hire retired doctors, medical experts and lawyers to bridge the communication gaps between doctors and patients and direct patients to resort to legal means in settling medical disputes.

The third-party mediation system for medical disputes is a latest reform to ease doctor-patient tension that sometimes escalate into violence.

Such incidents erupted several times this year, and in an extreme case in September, a 43-year-old surgeon in Beijing Tongren Hospital was stabbed by a patient into serious injury. The attack was believed to have been triggered by a medical dispute in which the patient alleged that the surgeon had committed malpractice during an operation.