The Shanghai Medical Emergency Center will begin distinguishing between emergency and non-emergency calls to better deal with the city's ongoing shortage of emergency medical personnel, local media reported Tuesday.

"The new measure aims to ensure that ambulances staffed with doctors are sent only to people with real medical emergencies," said Guan Min, the director of the Shanghai Medical Emergency Center.

The center will only staff ambulances with doctors for emergency calls, according to a report in the Xinmin Evening News.

 It will not put staff with more than basic medical training on ambulances that send patients home from the hospital, though it will have nurses on board for calls to transfer patients between hospitals.

In the past, the center has staffed all ambulances with doctors, which has led to bottlenecks in the ambulance dispatching service because of the shortage of ambulance doctors.

As of July 2012, there were 617 ambulance doctors working in Shanghai, even though official estimates suggest the city needs at least 1,000, the news portal eastday.com reported.

The shortage stems from the fact that there was no accredited paramedic training program in Shanghai before this year. Doctors who serve on ambulances have to undergo the same seven-year training as other doctors, even though they earn far lower salaries.

The problem has been exacerbated by the vast number of non-emergency calls that the center receives. More than 40 percent of the calls to the center are for non-emergencies, up from about 35 percent in 2005, the Xinmin Evening News reported.

The center sent ambulances on about 600,000 calls in 2012, according to a report on eastday.com.

Guan said the center has already implemented some of the staffing changes, but it has not yet decided when they will be rolled out citywide.

The center also plans to create a reservation system so residents who don't need emergency care can book an ambulance in advance.

In addition, the Shanghai Medical Emergency Center will begin handling all emergency calls across the city by the end of the month, uniting the nine different emergency dispatching services that handle calls in the outer districts such as Fengxian and Qingpu.

The center currently only transfers calls from those nine districts to their own emergency dispatching services.

After the services are unified, downtown operators will answer all of the emergency calls in the city and will have the discretion to decide which district's ambulance service will be responsible for handling each call.