Acting Health Minister Nguyen Thanh Long at the meeting (Photo: VNA) Hanoi (VNA) – During the 2021-2025 period, the health sector will push strong and comprehensive reform to meet rising public demand for health care and protection, striving to achieve high rankings in health care as compared to ASEAN and Western Pacific nations.
Acting Health Minister Nguyen Thanh Long made the statement at a meeting held by the Standing Board of the National Assembly’s Committee on Socio-Economic Affairs in Hanoi on September 17 to review the implementation of socio-economic targets and State budget estimate in nine months of this year and propose targets for 2021 and the 2021-2026 period in health care and population field.
He said since the beginning of this year, public health care and protection has seen positive results amid the COVID-19 pandemic, notably the number of hospital beds per 10,000 population and the rate of medical insurance participation meeting and surpassing targets assigned by the legislature.
The health sector is forecast to achieve other goals such as rising average life expectancy, strong decrease in child malnutrition, maternal and child mortalities, and others.
One of the outstanding results of the health sector in the past year was improving preventive medicine and prevention of dangerous infectious diseases such as Ebola and MERS-COV, early discovery and treatment of non-communicable diseases, he said.
However, he also admitted imbalance in health care service accessibility, overload in central-level hospitals, limited management of private health services, slow public investment disbursement, among others.
In the coming time, the health ministry will improve the capacity of preventive medicine system to cope with contingencies and public health incidents, ensure health security and food safety, enhance the quality of health check-ups and treatment, increase scientific research and adopt modern technology in early discovery, diagnosis and treatment of diseases, step up research and production of medical equipment and medicines, he said.
Permanent deputy head of the committee Bui Sy Loi asked leaders of the ministry to collect opinions at the meeting to complete reports for submission to the committee’s plenary session and the NA’s upcoming 10th meeting./.
