(Yicai) Jan. 7 -- China is planning to regulate the scale and development speed of tertiary hospitals, those with the largest number of beds and providing comprehensive medical services, given the steady growth of hospital beds.

The National Health Commission released a plan during its annual work conference ended yesterday to strengthen primary healthcare institutions, stabilize operations of secondary hospitals and expand their rehabilitation and nursing functions, and adjust the scale and development speed of tertiary hospitals.

Chinese hospitals are classified in a three-tier system. They are designated as primary, secondary, and tertiary, based on their size and ability to provide medical care, education, and research. Each category is split into grades, based on standards, such as the level of services and medical equipment. Grade-A tertiary hospitals generally have the best medical resources and infrastructure.

There is a decline in medical services’ purchasing power, so keeping expanding bed scale will not help meet hospitals’ requirements for economic operations and performance evaluations, a scholar told Yicai.

Driven by internal and external factors, more tertiary public hospitals are expected to actively control their infrastructure scale and shift the focus to disciplined development and salary reform, the scholar added.

The expansion momentum of beds in public Chinese hospitals continued in 2024 despite the slower pace, with the number of hospital beds per 1,000 people rising to 7.32 from 7.23 the previous year, according to statistics released by the NHC last month. However, the bed utilization rate declined in all primary, secondary, and tertiary hospitals.

The admission rates of public hospitals in China remain high, with secondary and tertiary hospitals siphoning patients to primary healthcare institutions, which instead lack support on the demand side.

In county-level regions, many hospitals are experiencing patient outflows and empty beds, with more and more patients turning to city hospitals, Yicai found. This trend further contributes to the slower flow of medical insurance funds into county-level areas, making the construction of consolidated county medical alliances difficult.

Editor: Futura Costaglione