Most hospitals in Ho Chi Minh City have confirmed that they have sufficient facilities so that their in-patients are no longer sharing a bed with two to three other patients, according to Nguyen Tan Binh, director of the Health Department of Ho Chi Minh City.

However, two central hospitals, the Hospital for Traumatology and Orthopaedics and the Ho Chi Minh City Oncology Hospital, have not met this condition. Each hospital currently has 140-180 in-patients over their 100 single bed capacity.

The announcement was made during a meeting yesterday between Health Minister Nguyen Thi Kim Tien and officials from the HCMC People’s Committee to discuss the overload at hospitals and the coverage of health insurance.

Every year, the city’s health sector offers diagnosis and treatment to an average of 40 million patients, half of whom come from other provinces and cities, said Tang Chi Thuong, vice director of the HCMC health department.

He admitted that the overload of hospitals has taken place for many years.

District level hospitals reach bed capacity of 90-100 percent

Recently, HCMC has built new hospitals and enlarged and upgraded old ones to tackle the overload at hospitals. The city has aided and transferred technology to provincial hospitals to limit the transfer of patients to HCMC.

District level hospitals have reached a bed capacity of 90 to 100 percent, thus limiting in-patients to central hospitals in the city.

In Vietnam, state-owned hospitals are divided into district, provincial, and central level ones. Generally, a patient with a normal disease is not admitted to a central-level hospital -- which boasts better doctors and facilities -- without recommendation from that of a lower level.

Part of the cause behind the overload at hospitals is the preference of patients for major or ‘central’ hospitals over those nearest to them.

The Ho Chi Minh City Oncology Hospital is an example since it has a total of 600 beds but has to accept 1,500 – 1,700 in-patients, meaning that two or three patients share a bed. Some even lie under the bed.

On average, a bed in K Hospital in Hanoi is used for 1.7 patients at the same time. The same holds true for Bach Mai Hospital in Hanoi, while Cho Ray Hospital sits at 1.4, the Central Children’s Hospital at 1.2 percent, and the Hospital for Tropical Diseases at 1.2.

According to the Ministry of Health, the overload of hospitals can be relieved when the nation has an average of 25-27 hospital beds per 10,000 people. It is now over 20 beds for 10,000 residents across the nation.

Concerning the issue of health insurance, Luu Thi Thanh Huyen, vice director of the HCMC Social Insurance, said the city has 5.5 million people under health insurance, or 69.18 percent of the population.

HCMC needs to attract an additional 500,000 people to join the insurance program this year to reach the target of 76 percent of the population.