With innovations in health-check procedures, millions of working hours have been saved and links in health testing alone have saved more than 300 billion VND per year.
The mostly publicly financed health care system in Vietnam has only been able to afford to pour resources into a handful of central level hospitals in big cities, forcing patients living in remote areas with serious diseases to go to Hanoi or HCM City for treatment.
The Vietnam Association of Financial Investors (VAFI) has proposed that the Prime Minister privatise State-owned hospitals to reform the healthcare system and improve the quality of health care services.
Patients and the broader health care system are desperately calling for a solution to a bed-sharing problem that has been protested for years, so far to little avail.
Advanced medical techniques in cardiovascular surgery and interventions have been successfully transferred to provincial hospitals, saving the lives of hundreds of patients every year.
The Ministry of Health has approved the inclusion of several more hospitals to the ‘Satellite Hospitals’ project in the period of 2016-2020, as heard a conference on implementing the project in Hanoi.
The biggest success of the Ministry of Health's provincial hospital development project was narrowing the gap on quality of treatment between central and lower-level hospitals.
Representatives of Cho Ray Hospital in Ho Chi Minh City and Dong Nai General Hospital in the southern province of Dong Nai gathered to discuss ways to expand the network of satellite hospitals.
A Ministry of Health’s plan to build additional satellite hospitals across the nation and upgrade existing ones lacks money and qualified personnel, Minister of Health Nguyen Thi Kim Tien has said.
Nearly 40 percent of provincial satellite hospitals have reported a
decrease in the number of patients being transferred to higher-level
hospitals for treatment, helping to lift the burden on central hospitals
that has been weighing them down for decades.