HOHHOT, May 12 (Xinhua) -- In north China's Inner Mongolia Psychology Consulting Center, the personnel department has received four letters of resignation in a week. Being one of the best hospitals in the region, the center has also been troubled with the problem of "nurse shortage" like many other small hospitals.

"Some new nurses quit one or two months later. They feel working as a nurse is too hard and what they do is not properly rewarded," said Guo Xiaofei, head with nursing department of Inner Mongolia Psychology Consulting Center.

"Nurse's work is really very hard. They work three shifts a day, paid usually about 1,500 yuan a month (about 195 U.S. dollars), sometimes less than a household cleaner's monthly pay.

"What's more, Chinese tradition holds that nurses are inferior to doctors. Sometimes, they are even disparaged," Guo admitted.

In Inner Mongolia, every thousand residents share 2.13 doctors but only 1.15 nurses.

Some top hospitals in Shanghai has seen a 20-percent outflow of nurses every year, said Wang Bei, a charge nurse with Shanghai Changzheng Hospital, who used to participate a study on nurses' working condition.

During the last two years, China had registered 120,000 new nurses but the total of 1.4 million nurses still fails to satisfy the need of the country's 1.3-billion population.

"Hospitals are usually more focusing on clinic techniques and treatment with less emphases on nursing, which is also to blame inletting go of nurses, even those senior and skilled ones," Wang remarked, noting that outflow of nurses is the main cause for the shortage.

According the Ministry of Health's plan, China will step up efforts to increase the number of nurses and launch training programs for more of them in future four years.

The outflow of health workers has become a worldwide problem that encounters many developed countries, including the United States and Britain, which recruit nurses from developing countries every year. About 800 Chinese nurses are employed by British hospitals every year.