They made statements at a conference on preliminary medical examination and treatment at medical clinics organized by the Ho Chi Minh City Department of Health yesterday.
According to Associate Professor-Dr. Tang Chi Thuong, Deputy Director of the HCMC Department of Health, 24 district health centers including 20 medical centers with polyclinics are located in the city. Presently, grass-roots medical centers are consisting of 319 health stations in districts and wards, including 27 family medical practices.
The Department’s statistics has shown that from 2015 to 2020, just a few of dwellers have gone to grass-roots healthcare clinics while the networks of district and ward medical clinics are located in the whole city.
Specifically, just around 1.2 to 2.7 million patients go to health centers in districts or wards yearly, accounting for 4-7.55 percent of the total number of those in the city. Conversely, family medical practice have been drawing more patients.
Some representatives of medical units explained that medical grass- root centers don’t meet patients’ demands for modern medical facilities and equipment yet; plus, treatment quality has not lived up to local people’s expectations.
Additionally, because many grass-root medical centers have not signed medical examination and treatment contracts with the health insurance agency, local people prefer to go to hospitals for medical treatments to grass root health centers.
At the meeting, leaders at medical centers in district and wards shared that the shortage of good physicians and policies to hold them is the main reason why people don’t prefer medical grass-root centers to infirmaries. Furthermore, grass-root centers are short of medicine.
In the upcoming time, to attract local patients to district-level medical centers for treatment, the HCMC Department of Health planned to provide good physicians to district -level medical stations as well as petition the Vietnam Social Insurance Agency to add more drugs in small medical stations’ list.
