The average life expectancy in China in 2015 was 76.34, an increase of 1.51 years from 2010, according to statistics released Thursday.

The infant mortality rate dropped from 0.89 percent in 2014 to 0.81 percent last year, while the maternal mortality rate lowered from 21.7 in every 100,000 in 2014 to 20.1 in 2015, according to the statistical bulletin released by the National Health and Family Planning Commission (NHFPC).

In 2015, personal health costs for Chinese residents fell by 2.02 percentage points year on year, accounting for 29.97 percent of the country's total health expenditure, which stood at 4 trillion yuan (608 billion U.S. dollars), the bulletin showed.

Private hospitals made up 52.6 percent of all hospitals in 2015, up 4.1 percentage points from the previous year, it said.

Also on Thursday, Guo Yanhong, an NHFPC official, who was speaking at a seminar, said that the number of nurses nationwide increased rapidly from 1.35 million in 2005 to 3.24 million last year.

China aims to have 4.45 million nurses by 2020, which means 3.14 nurses for every 1,000 people, Guo said.