China needs at least 2.2 million well-trained nurses to care for its 11 million bedridden elderly, but it presently has only 1 million caretakers -- the majority of whom are laid-off workers or rural women who have never been trained properly.
   
The country therefore needs to train more nurses to take better care of senile people that make up nearly 10 percent of China's population, according to a recent forum on the elderly's welfare in Kunming, southwest China's Yunnan Province.
   
China has presently 130 million people aged over 60, including 94 million over 65. It is estimated that by the middle of this century, there will be more than 400 million people aged over 65 and at least 100 million aged 80 or older.
   
Experts to the forum have called on medical schools across China to meet the demands of the aging population by offering medical students more courses on nursing elderly people.
   
More importantly, experts said local governments, hospitals and medical schools must not neglect the role nurses play.
   
Some Chinese hospitals tend to underestimate the nurse's role and recruit more doctors than nurses. Many medical students also think that nursing is an inferior occupation and want to be trained only as doctors.
   
As a result, the doctor/nurse ratio at Chinese hospitals averages 1:0.61, whereas the international standard ratio is 1:2.7,says a specialist based in Kunming.
   
By the end of 2004, the number of nurses in China had reached 1.308 million, 20,000 more than the previous year, according to the Ministry of Health.
   
About 1,000 Chinese has one nurse on average, a ratio far lower than that in most countries, which have four to five per thousand, said Huang Renjian, president of the Chinese Nursing Society.
   
Moreover, most nurses are working in big cities, the rural and western regions are in desperate need of nurses, Huang said.

(Xinhua News Agency October 8, 2005)