People line up in front of a hospital in Shanghai. (photo: Yang Hui/GT)

 

The overall competitiveness of Chinese mainland cities' medical hardware environment is relatively low, found a recent research by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS).

The medical hardware environment competitiveness took into consideration various statistics, including the figures of upper first-class hospitals, doctors, and hospital beds in the audited cities, said the report on the competitiveness of the urban medical hardware environment released by the CASS, which compared and analyzed the healthcare resource data of 286 prefecture-level or above Chinese cities.

There is a big difference between the cities with the maximum overall medical resources and those with the highest per capita resources, the report found. 

First and second-tier cities have relatively more doctors and hospital beds than other cities in total numbers, the report said, adding that Beijing and Chongqing municipalities respectively rank top as for the numbers of doctors and hospital beds.

Beijing had had over 11,000 doctors by August 2019, reported Beijing Youth Daily. Chongqing Municipality had had 220,104 hospital beds by 2018, according to China Health Statistics Yearbook 2019.

In terms of the number of doctors and beds per 10,000 population, by contrast, smaller cities accounted for the majority of the top 10 cities.

Changsha in Central China's Hunan Province, for instance, has the most hospital beds per capita as the report said. Every 100,000 people in Changsha had 94.8 hospital beds in 2018, Securities Times reported in March.

"While trying to increase overall medical resources such as the total number of hospital beds, big cities should also pay attention to and improve the level of local per capita healthcare resources," the report suggested.

In general, Chinese cities' medical hardware environment competitiveness is at a relatively low level and needs improvement, the report concluded. It is partly because China lacks enough healthcare investment, said Ni Pengfei, a CASS research fellow who led the group of researchers, tasked with compiling the report.

"As the vice-chairman of China Center for International Economic Exchanges Huang Qifan had pointed out, the number of hospitals in China was 33,009 in 2018, 3.55 times of that in 1978," the Beijing-based Economy Daily quoted Ni as saying on Saturday. "The investment in healthcare was a bit insufficient compared with China's GDP, which had increased 240 times during the past 40 years."