To keep preventive medicine "running well"

SGGP 05/30/2023 07:22

The Covid-19 pandemic has exposed weaknesses not only in social governance and management but also in the primary health care and preventive health systems. This area, if not for major events such as the pandemic, has long received little attention, even becoming almost “invisible” to a significant portion of the population.

The monitoring results announced on May 29 at the National Assembly showed that expenditure on grassroots health care out of total social health care expenditure decreased from 32.4% in 2017 to 23.1% in 2019. The proportion of expenditure on medical examination and treatment covered by health insurance at grassroots health care levels will reach 34.5% in 2022, of which the commune level will only reach 1.7%. The allocation of regular expenditures other than salaries for commune health stations is still low, with some localities only reaching 10-20 million VND/station/year, just enough to cover electricity, water, and administration. The income and benefits for officials are too low: the support level for village and commune health care is only 0.3 and 0.5 times the basic salary (equivalent to 447,000 VND and 745,000 VND).

Therefore, it is not surprising that the total number of staff working in preventive medicine from the central to district levels only meets 42% of human resource needs (about 23,800 people are short), while the number of people working in preventive medicine transferring jobs or resigning is increasing.

Many National Assembly deputies expressed their concerns, considering this the biggest challenge for the health sector in the current period. Increasing salaries, building new headquarters, buying machinery, etc. are necessary solutions, but they are not enough, and can even cause waste if they do not truly enhance capacity and create more "jobs" for the entire system such as treatment (primary health care, chronic disease management, first aid in the community, etc.). In the long term, it is necessary to develop and promulgate draft laws related to the field of primary health care and preventive medicine.

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