Health Ministry to step up comprehensive reform
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./.