The Government will allocate VND81.9 trillion (US$3.9 billion) for the health sector next year, a slight increase over the previous year, according to the Ministry of Public Health.

Health facilities at the grassroots level will continue to be upgraded, and the ministry will continue to work with agencies and local authorities to manage food quality and safety.

The government will also continue to work to reduce the patient overload at hospitals, especially those involved in paediatrics and oncology.

Public training facilities for health personnel and national target programmes on disease prevention like HIV/AIDS will receive increased investments.

In addition, the network on reproductive health care facilities from central to grassroots level will be upgraded.

More attention will be paid to scientific research and the application of the results for treatment, preventive health and production of medicine and vaccines.

In 2010, there were 13,598 health facilities in the country, including 1,094 hospitals with 252,747 beds. Of those, 102 hospitals are privately owned. Most of them are in HCM City, Da Nang, Hue and Hanoi.

Some regions in the country do not have enough healthcare facilities, particularly specialised centres. The preventive health system at the central level includes 15 specialised institutes and centres.

At the provincial level, there are 63 preventive-health centres, 63 food-safety and hygiene centres, 27 centres for malaria prevention, 23 centres for social-disease prevention and eight environmental health centres.

At the district level, there are 712 health centres.

Health care-personnel training facilities are in all 60 provinces and major cities, including 14 medical universities, 33 colleges of health and 42 schools for two-year training programmes in medicine.

However, the network has failed to meet the demand for doctors, nurses and health managers, particularly specialists, of which there is a shortage nationwide.

In addition, many health care staff are poorly qualified.