A city that pioneered health-care reform by privatising all its public hospitals 11 years ago has decided to open a large public hospital to cope with a 'shortage of quality medical services'.
Suqian, in Jiangsu, set an unprecedented example when it started selling its state-owned hospitals to privately run clinics in 2000 and then sold its largest hospital to a private medical group in 2003.
The move was warmly received by doctors and academics at the time.
Statistics showed that Suqian's medical sector assets totalled more than 4 billion yuan (HK$4.9 billion) last year, up 750 per cent on 1999, the year before it introduced the privatisation push and became an icon of mainland healthcare reform.
But now, the city has said it will build a large public hospital because of demand from residents. The director of its public health bureau, Ge Zhijian , said that while the supply of medical services had been inadequate before 2000, the problem now was medical care of insufficient quality.
Ge said the new hospital would be a modern class 3A hospital- the top classification on the mainland - with integrated teaching, research and medical services that would help train staff for county- and township-level hospitals.
