Vietnam, together with seven European countries, is participating in the pilot phase of a medical partnership co-implemented by the World Economic Forum (WEF), London School of Economics (LSE), and British multinational pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical company AstraZeneca, British Ambassador to Vietnam Gareth Ward announced at a launch ceremony in Hanoi on Tuesday evening.

Alongside Vietnam, the Partnership for Health System Sustainability and Resilience project has been put on trial in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, England, Poland, and Russia from August 2020 to January 2021.

During this phase, LSE experts will work with local expert groups to develop a health system resilience and sustainability assessment framework.

The working results will be the basic foundation for making policy recommendations and solutions to improve the participating nations’ ability to prevent, overcome, and recover from a health crisis as well as improve their predictability, management, and ability to mitigate the effects of both non-communicable and infectious diseases on the health system.

In Vietnam, experts will conduct two case studies on the quality of medical services and people's access to quality services, and grassroots health system capacity in providing general patient care and implementing disease prevention, said Dr. Tran Thi Mai Oanh, director of Health Strategy and Policy Institute (HSPI).

Those studies will be presented at the WEF Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland in January 2021.

“The assessment framework developed under this project will help to fully cater to the current state of the health system in Vietnam, especially the areas that need improvement for the health system to be sustainably strengthened, responsive, flexible as well as resilient,” said Dr. Oanh.

Experience in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic is one of the reasons why Vietnam was selected to participate in the project, British Ambassador to Vietnam Ward stressed.

With a population of more than 90 million people and a tropical climate, Vietnam has distinct geographic characteristics when compared to the seven countries participating in the pilot phase of the project, Nitin Kapoor, president of AstraZeneca Vietnam, told Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper.

Kapoor expressed his expectation that those factors will help the project expand its research scope and have more diverse experiences to apply in other countries in the future.

Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam!