Viet Nam has suffered a chronic shortage of medical staff with advanced training in applied epidemiology. Today five fellows graduated from Viet Nam’s Field Epidemiology Training Programme (FETP) which provides public health workers with the skills necessary to rapidly identify, investigate and respond to disease outbreaks. For a country where 3.5 million people a year are infected with communicable diseases such as influenza, cholera, typhoid, dengue and meningitis, the lack of trained epidemiologists can put immense strain on Viet Nam’s health system and seriously hamper its socioeconomic development.
The FETP, which exists in over 50 countries around the world, was established by Viet Nam’s Ministry of Health in 2008 in collaboration with the World Health Organization (WHO) and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), with funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and other international partners. “FETP is designed to meet the real need of disease investigation, prevention and control in Viet Nam, said Dr Phan Trong Lan, Ministry of Health Programme Director. “Today we are seeing the realization of many years of hard work, with the graduation of today’s class. We have the first of a new cohort of better trained and well informed epidemiologists who can be our nation’s disease fighters.” he said.
The training was launched in August 2009 and is a two-year, on-the-job fellowship programme which recruits key epidemiological staff across Viet Nam. Fellows enrolled in the first class received 12 weeks of classroom-based teaching and 15 months of rigorous, hands-on involvement in field epidemiological investigations. FETP fellows spent much of their time investigating outbreaks such as cholera, pandemic influenza A(H1N1), avian influenza A(H5N1), rabies, hantavirus, dengue and human plague in provinces across Viet Nam.
In addition to providing rapid disease surveillance and response, the fellows have had their work published in international scientific conferences and medical journals. “Throughout the course, I learned by doing, said Dr. Nguyen Cong Khanh, a medical doctor and graduating FETP fellow who investigated cholera and avian influenza (H5N1) outbreaks in North Viet Nam. ”The FETP programme gave me the practical epidemiological skills needed to work in a team to identify and investigate unusual disease activity, make a rapid risk assessment and, most importantly, provide solid recommendations to the Ministry of Health on how to stop its spread.” In recent years, Viet Nam has been affected by newly emerging infectious diseases such as severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), avian influenza A(H5N1), pandemic influenza A(H1N1) and hand foot and mouth disease. “The FETP fellows will help strengthen Viet Nam’s public health system to respond to disease outbreaks in order to minimize the negative impacts both at national and global levels,” said Dr. Graham Harrison, Acting WHO Representative.
For more information, please contact
Laura Ngo-Fontaine | tel. 3943 3734 Ext. 83826 | Ngofontainel@wpro.who.int
Phung Thi Thu Phuong | tel. 3943 3734 Ext. 83886 |PhungT@wpro.who.int