Singapore: While announcing its five-year road map for the healthcare sector, the Chinese State Council mentioned that the country will almost double the number of its general doctors by 2020, trim its public sector and improve technology as it seeks to fix healthcare system woes.

Global research and consulting firm Mc Kinsey explained in its recent research report that the Chinese healthcare market is growing fast and is expected to hit $1 trillion by 2020. This has attracted global players' medical device firms and operators to grab a slice of this share.

The roadmap, which laid out targets for healthcare officials nationwide between 2015 and 2020, said Beijing wanted to have two general doctors per thousand people by 2020, close to double the number at the end of 2013, as well as increasing the number of nursing and support staff.

Officials explained, "Healthcare resources overall are insufficient, quality is too low, our structures are badly organized and service systems fragmented. Parts of the public hospital system have also become bloated. Low salaries has resulted in scarcity of doctors in the country creating bottlenecks at popular urban hospitals and tensions between medical practitioners and often frustrated patients."

The roadmap also aims to implement digital databases for electronic health records and patient information for the entire population by 2020. The document also suggested further opening to the private sector, where Chinese and international firms have been taking a growing role in running hospitals.