Shenzhen will build and expand four hospitals with high standard in 2021, the first year of the 14th Five-Year Plan period (2021-2025), providing a total of more than 1,000 additional hospital beds, the city’s health commission said at a meeting Saturday.

Though the meeting did not disclose details about the hospitals, according to a resolution passed at a meeting of the top leadership at the Shenzhen Municipal Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC) in January this year, the city will speed up renovations of Shenzhen People’s Hospital and Shenzhen No. 2 People’s Hospital, and plan the construction of Phase II of Shenzhen Hospital of Fuwai Hospital of Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences in 2021.

Last week, construction on Nanshan Traditional Chinese Medicine Hospital started in Tongle.

The 18,000-square-meter hospital is estimated to cost 1.89 billion yuan (US$122 million) and will provide 800 hospital beds upon completion in 2024.

Shenzhen is striving to build a city with a first-class health service system and become a health care hub in the country, the commission said.

By the end of 2025, the city is expected to boast 60 high-level hospitals, more than 900 health care institutions, 82,900 hospital beds and 55,000 doctors. It will also build two leading prevention and control centers for key diseases and have three hospitals listed among China’s 100 best hospitals.

The city government spent 44 billion yuan on public health in 2020, up 31.3 percent compared to 2019. A total of 59 new community health centers and nine new hospitals were built, providing 11,000 additional beds. Another 1,350 general practitioner (GP) doctors began services, which increased the number of GPs for every 10,000 residents to 4 from 3.

Last year also saw the city roll out the country’s first public health emergency regulation.

The city was also internationally lauded for its extensive use of epidemiological surveillance, isolation of infected patients and quarantine of exposed individuals in the early months of the COVID-19 outbreak, which allowed scientists to estimate important characteristics of the infectious disease, according to a study co-led by researchers at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Forty years ago, Shenzhen only had one hospital in Bao’an County.

Now official data shows the number of high-level hospitals in Shenzhen accounts for 17 percent of Guangdong’s total, second to Guangzhou, the provincial capital.