Hanoi (VNA) - Queen Mathilde of Belgium on April 1 visited the Vietnam National Children's Hospital in Hanoi, which reflected the strong public healthcare cooperation between the two countries, particularly in the field of child mental health.
The Queen and her entourage, who are accompanying King Philippe in a state visit to Vietnam, were welcomed by Minister of Health Dao Hong Lan and the hospital's Director Tran Minh Dien.
For more than 30 years, Belgium and Vietnam have implemented numerous effective cooperation programs in this field.
Currently, the Vietnam National Children's Hospital is engaged in a partnership with Léonard de Vinci College under the 2022-2024 cooperation programme between the Vietnamese Government and the French Community of Belgium in Wallonia region. It focuses on training human resources, research collaboration on developmental disorders, and the implementation of Belgian therapeutic models in Vietnam. The initiative also includes support for improving infrastructure, providing medical equipment, and upgrading therapeutic spaces at the Vietnamese hospital.
The Queen is a psychologist and speech therapy specialist, as well as the Honorary President of UNICEF Belgium. She has a deep concern for health issues, particularly children's health. This visit serves as an important opportunity to highlight the long-standing cooperation between Vietnam and Belgium in this field, while also raising awareness of the importance of mental health care for children in Vietnam.
During this visit, the Queen met with doctors, psychologists, and patients at the Vietnam National Children's Hospital.
The Queen, along with Minister Lan, participated in an art therapy session, where they painted with adolescents and young people, and observed a psychomotor therapy session at the hospital's Psychiatry Department. Additionally, the Queen took the time to converse with and offer her best wishes to the young patients undergoing treatment at the hospital.
Health care cooperation between Vietnam and Belgium has been ongoing since the 1990s. One of the first collaborative healthcare projects between the two countries was the malaria prevention and control in Hoa Binh province project, which ran from 1996 to 2001. The project yielded excellent results, and over the six years of its implementation, the malaria situation in Hoa Binh significantly improved. The malaria prevention and control network across the northern mountainous locality was strengthened, with notable improvements in infrastructure, equipment, and staff capacity.
Both sides highly value the outcomes achieved through collaborative projects among universities, research institutes, and hospitals in Vietnam and their counterparts in Belgium in the healthcare sector.
These projects have played an important role in Vietnam's efforts to improve public health, thereby contributing to the country's socio-economic development and international integration. They have also helped lay the foundation for strengthening and expanding the partnership between Vietnam and the Wallonia-Brussels region in particular, and Belgium as a whole./.
