Minister of Health speaks at the UN conference on universal health care

The High-Level Conference on Universal Health Care within the framework of the 74th session of the United Nations General Assembly opened on September 23, 2019 at the United Nations headquarters in New York.

Minister of Health Nguyen Thi Kim Tien speaks at the conference. (Photo: Hoai Thanh/VNA)

With the theme “Building a Healthier World Together,” the conference attracted the participation of many heads of state, policymakers as well as senior leaders in the health sector of many countries.

Speaking at the conference, Vietnam's Minister of Health, Associate Professor, Dr. Nguyen Thi Kim Tien affirmed that Vietnam has made many efforts to strengthen the grassroots health system to provide better primary health care services to the people, ensuring that people can enjoy health care programs paid for by the state budget and health insurance.

The grassroots health system is established from the central to local levels with more than 11,000 commune-level health facilities, most of which have enough doctors, nurses, and midwives operating on the principle of family doctors. According to the 2017 universal health care monitoring report conducted by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the World Bank (WB), Vietnam's service coverage index reached 73/100 points, which can be considered quite high compared to the average level in Southeast Asia at 59/100 and the global level at 64/100.

The health insurance program has reached 90% of the population and currently the Vietnamese Government subsidizes 100% of health insurance premiums for people in difficult circumstances and pays 70% of insurance premiums for near-poor households.

According to the Minister, providing health care for the people is the way to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals on health. Recognizing the importance of primary health care, Vietnam has implemented 10 health sector reform policies to strengthen the effectiveness of the health system, especially improving the professional capacity of the grassroots health system to be able to provide health care for both sick and healthy people.

The Minister also emphasized that Vietnam has reformed its financial mechanism, invested in infrastructure and trained medical staff at grassroots health centers to ensure health care for all people. At the same time, Vietnam's reform policies also aim to put patients at the center, making people who seek medical examination and treatment increasingly feel secure and satisfied. According to the results of a recently published independent study, the rate of patient satisfaction with health services in Vietnam is 81%.

However, according to the Minister, the biggest difficulty for the Vietnamese health sector is finding a suitable financial mechanism for universal health care at the grassroots level because resources are still mainly focused on medical treatment services while the budget for primary health care services and preventive medicine is still very limited.

This year’s United Nations High-Level Meeting on Universal Health Care, attended by health leaders from 169 countries, aims to secure political and financial commitment from countries to achieve this noble goal. The United Nations High-Level Meeting on Universal Health Care was initiated in December 2017 when the United Nations adopted a resolution on global health and foreign policy to provide health care for the vulnerable for a society that leaves no one behind./.