Health systems governance in Viet Nam

Health systems governance entails the rules, norms, and practices in steering the health system and defining the functions, tasks, and authorities to achieve health policy objectives and accelerate progress towards the universal health coverage (UHC). Governments play a large stewardship role – while ensuring multi-sectoral collaboration, inclusiveness and participation – in the policymaking process for health policy development. Important stakeholders include provincial and local authorities, representatives of the public and marginalized populations, such as civil society organizations, and private sector. Strengthening health systems governance in countries is core to the overall health system, which underpins UHC development.

Viet Nam’s administration is organized across four levels – national, provincial, district, and communes. For health service delivery, there are three major levels of services – primary level with districts and communes, secondary level with provinces, and tertiary level with tertiary hospitals under the central government. The Five-year Health Sector Plan 2016-2020 begins to detail structural reform from central to local levels, including integrating district hospitals and district health centres into a unified district health office, merging provincial preventive medicine centres to provincial centres for disease control (CDC) while moving curative functions to hospitals, and consolidating quality control units for several medical and health-related items to food and drug testing and quality control units.

At the central level, in 2017, the government issued Decree No. 75/2017 NDCP that delineates the functions, tasks, authority and organization structure of the Ministry of Health for 2016-2020.  At the provincial level, Decree No. 51/2015/TTLTBYT-BNV was issued by the Ministry of Health and Ministry of Home Affairs in 2015 to guide the functions, tasks, authority and organizational structure of the departments of health and district health offices.

Viet Nam is one of the countries committed to the UHC 2030 partnership (originally the International Health Partnership, or IHP+), which promotes the principles for development effectiveness for the health sector. A Health Partners’ Group that was established in 2004 supports the high-level health policy dialogue among various key stakeholders, including government, development partners, and non-government organizations.