Hoping to fix an ailing health care service plagued by long wait times and poor service in rural areas, China says it is embarking on a program to double the number of doctors in the country.
Beijing says that by 2020 it wants the have two general practice doctors for every thousand people, almost double the number at the end of 2013, and intends to also increase nursing staff and support personnel.
"Health care resources overall are insufficient, quality is too low, our structures are badly organized and service systems fragmented," China's State Council said in announcing targets from now to the 2020 date
"Parts of the public hospital system have also become bloated," it said.
A lack of doctors, partly the result of low salaries, has led to long wait times for treatment at crowded urban hospitals, which is said to be causing tension between medical staff and frustrated patients.
Chinese officials also pledged to increase the use of technology in the health care system, including using "cloud systems" to move health records of most of the population to digital databases for centralization of patient information.
Global pharmaceutical companies, medical device makers and hospital operators will be watching closely as China's moves to modernize its health care system, eager to cash in on a health care bill predicted to reach $1 trillion by 2020.
Grassroots health care in rural areas will also be a focus of the new program, while large public hospitals in big cities may be trimmed back or turned over to the private sector, officials said.
Both Chinese and international firms have been moving into running hospitals in China.
"The role of public health institutions is too big, with the number of beds accounting for around 90 percent of the total," the State Council said in suggesting more private sector involvement.
Providing access to affordable health care has been a key platform for President Xi Jinping's government.
