Quality and patient safety in Viet Nam

Patient safety is a fundamental principle of health care. Every point in the process of care-giving contains a certain degree of risk to patient safety. Adverse events, or safety mishaps, may result from problems in practice, products, procedures or systems. Patient safety improvements demand a system-wide effort, involving actions in performance improvement, environmental safety and risk management, such as infection control, safe use of medicines, equipment safety, safe clinical practice and safe environment of care. To achieve safe and high quality care, countries need to build a health care system that prevents errors, learns from errors that did occur, and is built on the culture of safety that involves health care professionals, hospitals and patients.

Viet Nam has shown its commitment in delivering high quality and safe health care services to the people. The Adverse Drug Reaction (ADR) center was established in Viet Nam in 2009 to report adverse events related to medicines. In 2011, country also started an initiative to address medication errors and safety called, “Be Safe with Medicines[PDL1] ,” and has since become one of the key priorities of the Ministry of Health.

More recently, the Ministry of Health issued Circular 43/BYT/2018 “Guideline for prevention of medical adverse events in health care facilities.” The guidelines aim for establishing a health care environment where medical errors are identified, analyzed, reported, and handled to prevent occurrence in the future.