During the Cultural Revolution in 1968, the CCP supported a new system of health care delivery for rural areas. Each village is assigned a barefoot doctor (a medical staff with basic medical skills and knowledge to deal with minor illnesses) and is responsible for providing basic medical care. The medical staff combined the values of traditional China with modern methods to provide health and medical care to poor farmers in remote rural areas. The barefoot doctors became a symbol of the Cultural Revolution, for the introduction of modern medicine into villages where traditional Chinese medicine services were used.