The shortage of doctors in Vietnam’s remote provinces has become one of the country’s quietest healthcare crises. In reality, a patient in Hà Giang or Điện Biên may spend hours, even an entire day, traveling to a hospital with the right specialist, only to arrive too late. Behind each statistic lies a family’s story of loss, frustration, and injustice. In “What hinders Vietnam’s path to universal healthcare? The lack of human capital” (2019),  Toan Huynh and Satoru Imai (Worl

The phenomenon of “brain drain” is no longer unfamiliar. Every year, numerous young Vietnamese head overseas. Yet many of these youngsters, educated with family resources and sometimes even national funding, end up building their lives abroad. So what do we lose? Doctors who might have saved lives, engineers who could have built innovations, and researchers who could have pushed Vietnam to the frontiers of technology owing to the global knowledge they keep up to date with. I