Shortage of Doctors in Remote areas

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 (World Bank) stated that Vietnam has around 8 doctors per 10,000 people, with the majority concentrated in urban areas (35% of the population), while 62 poor districts face a shortage of about 600 doctors, and more than 30% of communes have no doctors at all. For years, the most outstanding medical graduates have gravitated toward major cities such as Hà Nội, Hồ Chí Minh City, or abroad, where career opportunities and compensation are more attractive. Rural clinics, meanwhile, are left with empty halls, aging equipment, and few doctors to serve many patients. The message is clear: some lives are valued more than others, depending on their postal code. 

As this issue continues, inequality in healthcare bleeds into inequality in education, productivity, and ultimately the resilience of our nation. When children grow up seeing healthcare as distant and unreliable, they internalize a dangerous lesson: the system is not built for them. 

To address this issue, we need practical solutions. Firstly, incentives for young doctors cannot be token gestures; they must be meaningful with fair pay, which would be at least in the upper half of the official pay scale - from 5.5 million to 11.6 million VND per month, depending on region and title - according to the official salary table effective from July 1, 2024, published on the Thư viện Pháp luật (Law Library) website. Moreover, telemedicine cannot remain a buzzword; it requires serious investment in infrastructure and training. For instance, in 2022, as reported by the Government’s online newspaper, Quảng Nam province launched a program providing rural doctors with up to 250 million VND in financial support along with housing allowances, though uptake remained low, underscoring that piecemeal benefits are not enough without a broader vision of career and community life.

Many residents in remote areas of Thái Nguyên received free medical check-ups and health consultations from doctors of major hospitals.

Vietnam has long prided itself on community solidarity. That solidarity must now extend to ensuring that a patient’s chance of survival does not depend on their postal code. Healthcare cannot call itself “universal” until doctors are present where they are needed most.