Nurse practitioners transforming Vietnam healthcare
VOV.VN - Many children, especially the poor and those living in rural and medically underserved areas of Vietnam, lack access to health care services, says Pham Duc Muc, president of the Vietnam Nurses Association.
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But there is a revolution underfoot across this great nation, said Mr Muc, speaking at a recent seminar in Ho Chi Minh City, that will change the face of healthcare forever for the better, that has been set in motion by the Vietnam Government.
The Government believes that experienced registered nurses can improve children's health if they are trained to provide many of the health care services that have historically been provided only by physicians.
So the Ministry of Health is collaborating with members of the private and civil society sectors across the nation to greatly expand the nurse practitioner (NP) program to all of the provinces.
NPs, said Mr Muc, are registered nurses who have completed specialized advanced graduate education, passed national board examinations, and are licensed to manage a broad range of health problems.
NPs are licensed to do physical exams and other medical procedures medical doctors routinely perform such as order and interpret results from blood tests and X-rays, diagnose and treat illnesses, and write prescriptions.
He said the country has had a NP program in place, but until now it has only been implemented on a limited scale. The ratio of NPs to doctors, according to the Ministry of Health, is currently 1.8 to 1 but plans now are to expand the ratio to 3.5 to 1 by 2020.
In other words, plans are to roughly double the number of NPs over the next four years, a monumental undertaking, that if successful, would forever change the face of healthcare.
On a typical working day, today, an NP on the day shift cares for eight patients and on a night shift the number of patients in some cases expands to 20 as a result of hospital understaffing.
Doubling the number of NPs, noted Mr Muc, would without a doubt exponentially improve the quality of healthcare and provide tens of millions better access to it.
Luong Ngoc Khue, head of Medical Services Administration of the Ministry of Health in turn noted that NPs are authorized to teach as professors and conduct research in colleges of nursing, medicine and public health.
They have also been given authority to organize health fairs, screenings and immunization campaigns in their community and conduct education programs on diet, exercise, smoking cessation and healthy lifestyle.
The latter, he added, would include programs to provide people healthcare advice on managing diseases such as diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, asthma, sports injuries, and the like.
According to figures from the Vietnam Nurses Association, he said there are some 120,000 NPs nationwide currently working in hospitals and healthcare clinics, so that – in rough numbers – means there would be an additional 120,000 (bringing the total to 240,000) more job opportunities opening up for the nation’s youth over the next few years.
Like other health care providers, NPs collaborate with other professionals to provide high quality health care services. All of the research in Vietnam to date shows that NPs provide safe, high quality and effective health care.
The hundreds of thousands of satisfied patients seen annually attest to the confidence patients and the government have placed in NP care and that the decision to revolutionize the NP program is highly commendable.
