HÀ NỘI — Deputy Prime Minister Vũ Đức Đam urged healthcare facilities nationwide to step up preventive healthcare services and ensure adequate vaccines to prevent the spread of epidemics such as measles and dengue fever.

Localities should allocate more money to reach the target of spending 30 per cent of healthcare service’s national budget on preventive medicine, he said at a working session with healthcare agencies on Thursday.

He also urged medical centre to play an active role in applying technology to modernise healthcare records and medical check-ups to reduce waiting times.

Minister of Health Nguyễn Thị Kim Tiến said technology application is the biggest challenge the sector needs to address. The ministry will step up technology application in the future to connect medicine supplying facilities and launch electronic personal health records.

In the past local hospitals applied new advanced techniques including tissue transplants, and successful lung transplants. The ministry has made efforts to improve healthcare service and change healthcare workers’ attitudes towards patients, the meeting was told.

Tiến said hospital overcrowding can be solved by investing in healthcare services at local medical facilities to meet patients’ demand while central hospitals must focus on developing techniques and quality healthcare to stop people travelling abroad for treatment.

However, the Deputy PM pointed out shortcomings at central and local facilities that make the service unable to meet expectations such as poor infrastructure, lack of medical equipment or healthcare workers of low capacity.

To address these shortcomings, he requested the healthcare sector improve their capacity by making medicine quality better, especially medicine used to treat non-infectious diseases.

Đam praised the health ministry for its efforts to hold national centralised bidding which helps reduce medicine prices and asked the sector to bring costs to same levels as Malaysia, the country with the lowest prices in ASEAN.

Đam asked healthcare sector to connect pharmacies to ensure medicine distribution and preservation. “The medicine quality will not be ensured unless it is well preserved and transported,” he said.

It aims to better manage prescriptions and selling prescribed medicine, looking forward to a future of having 100 per cent of anti-biotics sold with prescriptions by 2020.

Healthcare insurance costs should be adjusted in accordance with people’s income and must be relevant with service quality. The health ministry must increase the healthcare coverage for students as well, he said. — VNS