| Abstract | During the recent years, Vietnam has gained remarkable achievements in health sector.
Those achievements are impressive improvements in primary health care. Children
mortality rate, as well as maternal mortality rate has fallen down quickly. Expanded
vaccination programs have contributed significantly to the control of disease that can be
prevented by vaccination.
While the overall trend in health improvement has been positive, there are still big gaps in
most key health indicators by region, income and ethnicity. In addition, there are still a lot
of concerns. Vietnam is still behind other neighboring countries in the prevention of
tuberculosis (TB), malaria, HIV/AIDS, dengue fever. Newly emerging diseases, i.e. SARS,
avian influenza, and swine flu are still challenges to the country.
In order to achieve the goals of improving the provision of health services, access to care,
and coverage for the period 2010-2015, the Government needs huge investment capital
from both national and international sources.
As one of the key donors in Vietnam, World Bank‘s portfolio increases gradually since
1996 including in health sector. However, implementation progress of Bank‘s projects in
health sector is not very positive. Three out of six projects had to extend the project
duration. Disbursement rate in general is behind the original schedule.
The identified root causes of the situation are: (i) slow start up of project, (ii) slow
procurement progress, (iii) unfavorable implementation environment, (iv) problems in
institutional arrangement/staffing issues, (v) unexpected issues such as inflation, weather
disadvantages, etc.
In order to improve the project performance, several recommendations have been provided
for consideration: (i) take the advantage of retroactive financing as a way to speed up the
start of a project, (ii) pay more attention to time management, (iii) compliance of
procurement procedures, (iv) review of cost norms, and (v) extension is granted only on
exceptional cases |