Help!

China leads the world in building things – railways, subway systems, power & water plants, roads, bridges, office blocks, whole cities – you name it, they build more of it & quicker than anyone else. So if you need a wall building, or to fix all the other broken infrastructure, who you gonna call (especially if most of your existing construction workers end up the wrong side of the wall)?

But there is more to discuss on the call - free trade, after all, benefits all sides. There's a saying that China has the hardware, but still lacks the software. And that is definitely the case in the healthcare sector. China is massively expanding its healthcare coverage to all areas of the country, and to cover all people. And at the same time trying to meet the rising needs from a rapidly aging population and rising levels of ill health, the by-product of their rising wealth (obesity, diabetes, age related diseases).

That means lots of new hardware - hospitals, senior care and specialist treatment centers, equipment etc. Planning laws have been changed to require health, senior care, and training facilities to be included in new developments, and restrictions relaxed on private hospitals and foreigners entering the sector.

New mixed community developments incorporating healthcare facilities are sprouting up everywhere, but the empty room shows the issue – where to get suitably qualified staff and management for servicing all these new health facilities? The developers know how to build property & sell it, not how to manage healthcare facilities.

With the speed of development of the hardware, the software is struggling to keep up - there is a shortage of suitably experienced and qualified healthcare facility managers. And which country has a lot of software, and the biggest healthcare market in the world? I am currently working with a number of Chinese developers, helping them find international healthcare management experts to design, manage and/or take over the senior care, hospital, and wellness centers being built.

I need 20 million people trained, can you help?

Management services is a big opportunity, but who do they manage? China has approximately 3.5 million nurses, equal to 2.5 per 1,000 people, compared to 11 in the US & 18 per 1,000 in Switzerland. If China were to increase the number of nurses per head to the same level as the US, it would need an additional 12 million nurses – roughly equivalent to the number of illegal immigrants in the US - perhaps there is a deal to be done!

China’s 3.2 million doctors may sound a lot, but not when you have over 1.4 billion people to look after – equal to 2.3 per 1,000 people against 4+ in Germany & the US – China would need over 2 million additional doctors to get to US levels. The waiting times in Chinese hospitals can literally bore you to death.

So how can China recruit and train over 20 million healthcare staff, including the existing 8 million healthcare workers? Chinese universities churn out around half a million medical students a year, but many of those do not go into the profession, and of those that do, a large % leave it to go to work for drug companies or in other fields. The position in specialist health is even worse - China's medical schools produce around 2,000 pediatricians a year – against a current shortfall of 100,000! Mental health and senior care present a huge range of opportunities given the shortfall of facilities and staff - sectors I am working on currently, trying to find suitable international partners.

What can be done? Bringing in healthcare professionals from overseas cannot solve the issue – there are shortages in many countries already, and certainly not enough to go round. And even if you could attract people from overseas, what about the language, cultural, qualification, types of medicine and similar issues & differences?

Increasing the training available within China is the better long term solution. So is this the time to suggest setting up a Trump University campus in China? The UK earlier this year signed an agreement in Beijing to bring the UK’s renowned expertise in health training to China. But language is an issue.  Hong Kong based Dragon Jade (US OTCQX: DGJI), in which I have a shareholding, announced last week that it is setting up a new division for providing staff and training, setting up centers in China, using trainers from Taiwan and Hong Kong, who have the necessary language and cultural skills. It also announced the use of virtual and augmented reality (VR & AR) systems for large scale training – given the sheer number of people that need training in a short period of time, and particularly in the countryside where there are significantly less training centers and facilities, such solutions make sense. I am working on several projects in China looking at using technology solutions for mass, online and remote training, and seeking international solution providers.

Whilst training in conventional and alternative medicine will be a massive growth industry in China, with huge opportunities for local and overseas businesses, it will be part of a portfolio of solutions. AI, robotics, telemedicine, genomics, personalized medicine and a range of solutions will continue to develop to reduce the need for medical staff, and use resources more efficiently. Preventive, alternative, and wellness solutions are being more widely promoted to stop people getting sick in the first place. The US excels in many of these areas - time for Trump to prove his deal making skills to make America Great Again and China Healthy Again.