Bayer HealthCare (BHC) recently signed an agreement with the Ministry of Health (MOH) to train more than 10,000 doctors from county-level hospitals in central and western China in the next five years.

BHC will spend 20 million yuan (2.66 million U.S. dollars) on the training program, which will cover 332 poverty-hit counties in 11 provincial-level regions including Gansu, Shaanxi, Jiangxi, Sichuan, Yunnan, Guizhou, Xinjiang, Tibet and Ningxia.

Gansu Province in the northwest has been selected as the pilot province in the first phase of the program, and Lanzhou University, one of China's key universities in the region, will provide technical support for the pilot program which offers training courses for physicians, surgeons, gynecologists, obstetricians and paediatricians.

The experience of the pilot program in Gansu will be applied in other program-covered areas.