China to steer public hospitals onto path of quality development in 5 years

BEIJING, June 4 (Xinhua) -- China plans to shift its public hospitals from focusing on scale expansion to quality and efficiency improvement in five years, according to a guideline on promoting the high-quality development of public hospitals.

Noting that public hospitals serve as the mainstay of the country's national medical network, the document, issued by the General Office of the State Council, laid out six key tasks for the purpose.

A raft of high-quality hospitals at the national and provincial level are in the pipeline, and a multi-level treatment network for major epidemic diseases will be established and improved, according to the guideline.

Efforts should be made to boost the development of clinical medicine, push forward innovations in medical technologies and services and give more play to the information technology, it read.

The guideline also called for deepened reforms of medical service pricing and medical insurance payment models.