Viet Duc University Hospital is the largest surgical center in Vietnam, with an excellent reputation for its work in cardiovascular surgery, neurosurgery, endoscopic surgery, liver cancer surgery, plastic surgery, and other types. It has a team of leading doctors and professors who are able to diagnose and treat serious cases as well as perform most complicated surgeries.
Viet Duc University Hospital is known for its surgical expertise not just in Hanoi, but in all of Vietnam. Most of the patients who need complex surgical intervention in Vietnam prefer to come to Viet Duc because of the experienced doctors and the modern equipment. However, this brings various challenges.
The hospital must treat 30 to 40 percent more patients than the Ministry of Health recommends, and as a result, it is always overloaded. Patients transferred from lower level hospitals in various provinces of Vietnam also face many difficulties. These include long travel times (sometimes up to 24 hours for remote and mountainous areas), and poor but expensive medical transportation methods, especially for serious cases. This has led to higher mortality rates and worsened patient conditions.
The obvious solution was to deploy more doctors in the provinces. This would not only help reduce the patient influx into city hospitals but would also bring healthcare closer to the patients in the provinces. However, this solution also had some issues.
Patients didn’t trust the expertise and skills of healthcare professionals at lower-level hospitals (as in the provinces), so they continued to come to Viet Duc Hospital, making it even more overcrowded.
At the same time, doctors in the provinces, especially the younger, inexperienced ones, didn’t have enough guidance and support to conduct surgeries.
One of the main tasks of the Viet Duc Hospital doctors is to provide expert guidance to lower-level hospitals, but this training required doctors and professors to travel to over 28 provinces throughout the year. Their absence from Viet Duc Hospital due to their training schedules made it even harder to deal with Viet Duc’s patient influx.
Since 1995, the hospital had tried many ways to solve this problem.
