Vietnam Focuses on Health Human Resource Training

Priorities for disadvantaged areas Over the past years, Vietnam’s investment to upgrade health stations has remained limited, particularly in remote areas. Therefore, the government needs to offer more priorities for disadvantaged areas as Vietnam has not yet issued any specific legal documents on the rate of state budget spending for healthcare services which have still depended on each locality’s decision. As a result, the rate is very different between cities and provinces nationwide. The rate can be 5.5 per cent, 6 per cent or even 8 per cent. Many remote localities have increased investment for healthcare services, but still in a limited scale, causing difficulties for the health sector. On the other hands, the localities are facing shortage of qualified medical staffs. Therefore, to boost health socialisation, concerned agencies need to build an open legal corridor offering priorities for healthcare services in remove and disadvantaged areas.

Shortage of health workers

According to the Ministry of Health, Vietnam has an average rate of 6.5 per cent of doctor per 100,000 people. The figure for the Mekong Delta region is just 1.1 per cent. In this situation, the ministry has built a project on human resource training for the health sector, aiming to raise both quantity and quality for the training. Recently, the Ministry of Health has opened an online talk on the implementation of the health staff training project in 63 cities and provinces nationwide. At the conference, representatives from several provinces of Ninh Thuan, Soc Trang, Lai Chau and Dak Nong pointed out the shortage of doctors due to low salary and subsidy levels and particularly limited working conditions as well.

Officials from Lai Chau province’s Health Department said, over the past five years,no medical graduate has voluntarily worked at local health centres. Meanwhile, more local doctors tend to move to plain hospitals or private hospitals. The Health Ministry’s leaders said, the number of medical graduates increases 25 per cent annually; however, the number of pharmacists working in state-owned agencies reduced 800. On the other hands, some wards, which are in dire need of staffs, are unable to recruit graduates such as preventive health, paediatrics, forensic medicine and tuberculosis. Many people said that one of major reasons for this is student do not chose these areas for social concept and modest income. 

 

Although the Ministry of Health has applied the selected enrollment in Central Highlands region and the Mekong Delta as well as several disadvantaged provinces between 2007 and 2018, it faced difficulties in the student selection because local students fail to reach the enrollment criteria. For instance, Ninh Thuan province, which has seven quotas for medical students, has not yet selected any students last year. Additionally, 20 local doctors stopped work in the year.

 

Currently, most of cities and provinces nationwide lack of preventive health cadres, meanwhile, a remarkable number of staffs working in this sector often move to other hospitals or centres after a period as their major is not preventive health. Some experts suggested specialty should be specified right from training and recruitment, if not, preventive health cadres will move to work in other areas just after a short time. All of these figures showed Vietnam’s serious shortage of health staffs. Vietnam should have more attractive priorities to attract young medical graduates to work in remove areas. This is a question for the ministries of Finance, Education and Training and Internal Affairs in the coming time.