Health Indicators
Indicators of the status of China’s health sector can be found in the nation’s fertility rate of 1.8 children per woman (a 2005 estimate) and the infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births was 25.3 (a 2004 estimate).
In 2005 China had about 1,938,000 physicians (1.5 per 1,000 persons) and about 3,074,000 hospital beds (2.4 per 1,000 persons). Health expenditures on a purchasing power parity (PPP) basis were US$224 per capita in 2001, or 5.5 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). Some 37.2 percent of public expenditures were devoted to health care in China in 2001 . However, about 80 percent of the health and medical care services are concentrated in cities, and timely medical care is not available to more than 100 million people in rural areas. To offset this imbalance, in 2005 China set out a five-year plan to invest 20 billion renminbi (RMB; US$2.4 billion) to rebuild the rural medical service system composed of village clinics and township- and county-level hospitals.
Read more about this topic: Health In China
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