The Hard Knock Viet Physician Life

Vietnam is in the midst of a dramatic economic growth transformation due to the normalization of relations in 1995 and major trade agreements in 2000 with the United States. Unfortunately with a rapidly growing population of 84 million, Vietnam faces several serious health challenges such as HIV/AIDS, public health education, and poverty. Vietnam’s foremost challenge is the training of health professionals.

As a medical student, I was disheartened to see many physicians lacking the basic knowledge of HIV or up-to-date medical care. The wide variance of skill and education level particularly in rural areas has left the national healthcare infrastructure exceptionally weak and fragile.

After only six years of post-high school training, twenty four year olds can become fully licensed general practitioner set free to start private practices. I have been told that allegedly at some medical schools one can buy a doctors degree without the formal education. Post-secondary education has been neglected for the past three decades until recently. For instance, in 1995, only 5% of college-age people were expected to get higher education.

In addition, the initial lack of training leaves unprepared physicians to serve a massive patient population. One Vietnamese physician serves 100,000 people whereas in the U.S, 286 physicians serve 100,000 people. Yet, Viet Nam simply does not have the financial resources to graduate more physicians to remedy the shortage.

Furthermore, there is little financial incentive for the intellects of tomorrow to pursue medicine because business management and engineering provide greater income. With only $100 a month in the public sector, many Vietnamese physicians are forced to open ill-equipped private practices. Thus Vietnamese medical schools are unlikely able to recruit more qualified individuals in this economic environment and lengthening the years of training will likely dissuade more people from selecting medicine as a profession.

Also improving the medical training does not always equate to a better health care system in a developing country. Developing countries across the world are losing their best trained professionals to nations with higher standards of living. Concurrently, some physicians prefer to work in well-equipped and high income metropolitan areas rather than in isolated and poor rural areas.

For the physicians who want to know the current medical practices, they must also be proficient in the English language. Most Vietnamese medical resources originate from the translation of a foreign text, but the most current journals do not exist in Vietnamese. Then on top of that barrier, access to medical journals can run upwards to hundreds of dollars a year, leaving the immense medical knowledge inaccessible to the average physician.

The blame does not go to the individual physician, but rather on insufficient ongoing medical training, access to medical knowledge, and the economics of Viet Nam. In the right economic environment, the Vietnamese are known for their incredible work ethic and proven to be successful in many professional fields in the United States the past two decades. Thus as the economics of Viet Nam change, I believe the medical training can slowly accelerate with it.