The Government will allocate 81.9 trillion VND (3.9 billion USD) forthe health sector next year, a slight increase over the previous year,according to the Ministry of Public Health.

Health facilitiesat the grassroots level will continue to be upgraded, and the ministrywill continue to work with agencies and local authorities to manage foodquality and safety.

The government will also continue to workto reduce the patient overload at hospitals, especially those involvedin paediatrics and oncology.

Public training facilities forhealth personnel and national target programmes on disease preventionlike HIV/AIDS will receive increased investments.

In addition, the network on reproductive health care facilities from central to grassroots level will be upgraded.

More attention will be paid to scientific research and the applicationof the results for treatment, preventive health and production ofmedicine and vaccines.

In 2010, there were 13,598 health facilities in the country, including 1,094 hospitals with 252,747 beds.
Of those, 102 hospitals are privately owned. Most of them are in HCM City, Da Nang, Hue and Hanoi.

Some regions in the country do not have enough healthcare facilities,particularly specialised centres. The preventive health system at thecentral level includes 15 specialised institutes and centres.

At the provincial level, there are 63 preventive-health centres, 63food-safety and hygiene centres, 27 centres for malaria prevention, 23centres for social-disease prevention and eight environmental healthcentres.

At the district level, there are 712 health centres.

Health care-personnel training facilities are in all 60 provinces andmajor cities, including 14 medical universities, 33 colleges of healthand 42 schools for two-year training programmes in medicine.

However, the network has failed to meet the demand for doctors, nursesand health managers, particularly specialists, of which there is ashortage nationwide.

In addition, many health care staff are poorly qualified.-VNA