A doctor at HCMC’s Tu Du Maternity Hospital scans a pregnant woman during the usual lunchtime break.

Hospitals around Ho Chi Minh City have streamlined admission and billing procedures and extended their hours to try to keep up with the increasing demand for medical care.

Dung said the hospital had eliminated several formalities for patients with state health insurance, assigned more staff to admit patients and started collecting hospital fees at different places around the hospital.

At District 5’s Nguyen Tri Phuong Hospital, chronic patients will be able to collect their medication once every two weeks or once a month instead of having to come to the hospital every week for their drugs, said director Nguyen Thi Hung.

Hung said next year the hospital will install computers at patient reception sections to speed up admissions.

In Ho Chi Minh City, one of the major changes at Gia Dinh, Nguyen Tri Phuong and many other hospitals is that doctors start earlier every day and work through the usual one-anda-half hour lunch break.

Tran Thanh My, director of the HCMC Trauma and Orthopedic Hospital in District 5, said the hospital manages to examine an extra 200 patients a day by using the break time.

By starting at 6 a.m. instead of 7:30 a.m. and treating patients through lunch, HCMC Tumor Hospital in Binh Thanh District performs an extra 500 ultrasounds a week and examines an extra 180 to 200 patients a day, hospital director Le Hoang Minh said.

Minh said the hospital was also scheduling surgery on the weekend, operating on 50 to 60 patients each weekend.

Pham Viet Thanh, director of Tu Du Maternity Hospital in District 1, said the hospital doctors were divided into two shifts: from 6 a.m. to 1 p.m. and from 1 p.m. to 6 p.m.

Some hospitals have also given equipment and training to smaller district and provincial hospitals in an effort to reduce the flood of patients to the city.

Hung Vuong Hospital has trained staff at Hoc Mon and Binh Chanh districts in obstetric surgery while the Trauma and Orthopedic Hospital has given expertise and equipment to provincial Khanh Hoa Hospital in the central region and hospitals in southern Kien Giang and Tien Giang provinces.

Health authorities attributed the patient overload at many central hospitals in HCMC and Hanoi to the fact that residents don’t trust district and province level healthcare, preferring to travel to major city hospitals.

In Can Tho City in the Mekong Delta, from next year, two private hospitals will, for the first time, start accepting patients with state health insurance in an effort to ease the overload of patients at the city’s public hospitals. Previously, people with state health insurance were only able to be treated at public hospitals.

Until the end of this year, Can Tho Insurance Agency will help the state-owned companies, which must register where their employees are treated as part of the state insurance scheme, switch from public hospitals to the private Hoan My Cuu Long Hospital and Tay Do General Hospital, insurance agency director Tran Van Minh said.

Tay Do Hospital is able to offer Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), computerized tomography (CT) and 4D ultrasound scanning while Hoan My Cuu Long can also treat womb fibroma and early-stage liver cancer, perform hip and knee replacements and provide dialysis.

Hoan My Cuu Long Hospital treats patients from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. with a one hour break at noon from Monday to Saturday and from 7 a.m. until noon on Sunday while Tay Do General Hospital opens at 6:30 a.m. every morning.

Ho Van Sanh, deputy director of Hoan My Cuu Long Hospital, said insurance holders would receive the same treatment as other patients.

In many hospitals, insurance holders often receive less attention and substandard services.

Tay Do General Hospital will be able to treat insurance holders with most conditions, according to the hospital director Huynh Quang Mau.

Mau said the hospital could call on the services of 60 doctors in the southern region and was able to deal with a variety of critical cases.

Reported by Thanh Tung – Quang Minh Nhat