Patients filing paperwork at Ho Chi Minh City Tumor Hospital.

Encouraging results from a pilot project that deputed medical personnel from big cities and provinces to work in rural and remote areas have prompted the Health Ministry to persist with the initiative.

Project 1816, carried out nationwide last August, has sent hundreds of doctors and medical workers to hospitals and medical centers in rural provinces and districts.

The medical experts stayed for three months at the hospitals to share their experiences and demonsrate their skills in an effort to improve services at local health facilities and ease the overload problem at higher-level hospitals.

“The project can benefit more people when the way it is organized improves this year,” said head of the ministry’s Medical Service Administration (MSA) Ly Ngoc Kinh. “The Health Ministry will be the body to assign medical experts instead of the hospitals’ board of directors.”

Kinh said there was also a plan to extend the term of assignments for doctors and medical workers.

“The Health Ministry will suggest that the government should provide legal documention on the issue,” he said. “Doctors may accordingly be assigned to local health facilities for between three and five months instead of the current term of three months.”

First results

Project 1816 sent 619 doctors and medical workers to hospitals in 56 provinces and thousands of patients have benefited from the improved health services.

“A team of doctors from higher-level hospitals, being assigned for a few months, has improved our staff much more than when we sent them for refresher courses for years,” said the director of a hospital that benefitted from the project. “Our staff made great improvements after being practically instructed by them.”

He said the assigned doctors had also helped them with managing work.

MSA’s Kinh said most of the knowledge being transferred was basic and practical to meet the demands of local hospitals.

“With the support from central and higher-level hospitals, healthcare quality has been improved remarkably at local facilities,” he said.

“This will reduce the number of patients who don’t feel safe when being treated at local hospitals. Moreover, the move also lessens possible errors caused by doctors at local hospitals,” he added.

Kinh said that central hospitals were also helping themselves by lending their staff because the project was helping solve a major overloading problem, part of which was that many patients were coming to central and other major hospitals with diseases and illnesses that were not serious and could easily be treated at local clinics.

Quality care matters more

The project was designed to fight the actual cause of the overload facing hospitals in big cities and provinces, but several measures implemented recently hadn’t improved the situation.

“It has been proven in reality that having more beds and constructing more hospitals hasn’t solved the problem,” said an official of the Ho Chi Minh City Health Department. “Most hospitals in HCMC have set up more beds, and up to 30 private hospitals have been constructed in the last ten years, but the overload problem remains the same.”

He said increased investment would be more effective if directed at improving healthcare quality at local facilities and constructing some specialized hospitals, to ease the overload in big cities.

Health Department statistics show an increase of up to 15 percent in the number of patients at central and provincial hospitals in 2008.

The numbers of outpatients and people going to hospitals for examinations has increased by between 5.8 percent and 13.4 percent every year since 2004. The number of patients admitted to hospitals, meanwhile, has been rising by between 7.2 percent and 12.3 percent in the same period.

Up to three patients sharing a bed and beds being installed in lobbies and corridors have become common sights at central hospitals, including Bach Mai, the National Hospital of Endocrinology in Hanoi and the Cho Ray and Tumor hospitals in HCMC.

A recent survey of 194 hospitals nationwide found that they had exceeded the year’s plan to have more beds by 115 percent.

Many hospitals had to extend working hours, enforce outpatient treatment and shorten the treatment duration of inpatients.

According to the Health Department, for every 1,000 residents, there are only 1.73 hospital beds available. The government has set a target to increase this to 2.05 beds per 1,000 residents by 2010.

Reported by Lien Chau - Thanh Tung