This book presents a detailed overview of the healthcare environment in Viet Nam. Given the general lack of understanding of healthcare in the Vietnamese context, it discusses the background and history, current status and the future of healthcare in the country. The first part of the book provides a summary of the current state of Vietnamese healthcare, incorporating discussions on the training and professional practice environment and the development, implementation and impact of national insurance policies. In addition, it highlights the cultural aspects of health provision and behaviours, technology integration and health trends from a number of angles based on standard global reporting dimensions. The second part elaborates on the 5-year strategic plan for national healthcare management and the top 5 barriers to meeting these planned objectives. It documents key investors and project objectives and outcomes, as well as the top 10 health issues in Vietnam including an overview of national and international initiatives to tackle these issues, addressing financial and social burdens in the process. In the third part, the book outlines the opportunities and barriers for improvement in healthcare outcomes for Viet Nam, providing evidence to support future work by local or international researchers. It is a fundamental text for anyone looking to work or research in the Vietnamese healthcare environment and provides an outline for project planning and targeted programs of work to achieve measureable improvements in Viet Nam.

Have U.S. military personnel experienced health problems from being exposed to Agent Orange, its dioxin contaminants, and other herbicides used in Vietnam? This definitive volume summarizes the strength of the evidence associating exposure during Vietnam service with cancer and other health effects and presents conclusions from an expert panel. Veterans and Agent Orange provides a historical review of the issue, examines studies of populations, in addition to Vietnam veterans, environmentally and occupationally exposed to herbicides and dioxin, and discusses problems in study methodology. The core of the book presents What is known about the toxicology of the herbicides used in greatest quantities in Vietnam. What is known about assessing exposure to herbicides and dioxin. What can be determined from the wide range of epidemiological studies conducted by different authorities. What is known about the relationship between exposure to herbicides and dioxin, and cancer, reproductive effects, neurobehavioral disorders, and other health effects. The book describes research areas of continuing concern and offers recommendations for further research on the health effects of Agent Orange exposure among Vietnam veterans. This volume will be critically important to both policymakers and physicians in the federal government, Vietnam veterans and their families, veterans organizations, researchers, and health professionals.

One of the first medical ethnographies to be written on contemporary Vietnam, Familiar Medicine examines the practical ways in which people of the Red River Delta make sense of their bodies, illness, and medicine. Traditional knowledge and practices have persisted but are now expressed through and alongside global medical knowledge and commodities. Western medicine has been eagerly adopted and incorporated into everyday life in Vietnam, but not entirely on its own terms. Familiar Medicine takes a conjectural, interdisciplinary approach to its subject, weaving together history, ethnography, cultural geography, and survey materials to provide a rich and readable account of local practices in the context of an increasingly globalized world and growing microbial resistance to antibiotics. Theoretically, it draws on current critical and cultural theory (in particular applying Pierre Bourdieu's work on habitus and practical logics) in innovative but approachable ways. David Craig addresses a range of contemporary fascinations in medical anthropology and the sociology of health and illness: from the trafficking of medical commodities and ideas under globalization to the hybridization of local cultural formations, knowledge, and practices. His book will be required reading for international workers in health and development in Vietnam and a rich resource for courses in cultural geography, anthropology, medical sociology, regional studies, and public and international health.

This book describes the nature of public-private partnerships (PPPs) in the health sector in Vietnam. It defines health-related PPPs, describes their key characteristics, and develops a taxonomy of the different types of PPPs that exist in practice, illustrated by international examples. It also assesses the regulatory and institutional framework for the health PPP program in Vietnam, as well as financing and accountability mechanisms for PPPs at its national and subnational levels. It provides an overview of the PPP project pipeline in Vietnam and analyzes important issues in the health PPPs’ design, preparation, and implementation, using eight case studies involving projects in different phases of the project cycle. This book also examines barriers that have hampered the successful design and implementation of health care PPPs in Vietnam. These barriers may be broadly categorized as barriers in the PPP policy and regulatory framework, in the public sector, in the private sector, and in the financial sector. It proposes feasible and actionable recommendations so that the government can consider tackling the identified barriers and advance the successful design and implementation of health PPPs.

What is a national medicine? What does it mean for a medicine to be traditional and scientific at the same time? How could a specifically Vietnamese medicine emerge out of the medical practices and treatments that have flourished and waned during key socio-cultural encounters in Vietnam? This book answers these questions by examining the making of Vietnamese medicine from a historical and contemporary perspective. Ever since its fourteenth century emergence out of the traditions and practices of the much more globally celebrated Chinese medicine, Vietnamese medicine has been engaged in a constant effort to define, guard and more recently, revive itself. In this collection of empirically-rich chapters, international scholars specialising in history, sociology, anthropology and medicine show how this process has played out through very much ongoing North-South and West-East encounters. Vietnamese medicine is practiced, produced and consumed in contexts of medical pluralism and globalisation, not only within Vietnam, but increasingly also among the Vietnamese diaspora around the world. Its development and modernisation cannot be detached from Vietnam’s tumultuous and tragic quest for independence. The compass points that saturate every chapter in this volume suggest that the making of Vietnamese medicine has been as much related to post-colonial national identity formation as it has to national efforts to address the health problems of the Vietnamese people.