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Chao buoi sang and good morning from Ha Noi. It’s a great pleasure and privilege to be joining you virtually this morning, alongside Dr Duong Thi Hong – Viet Nam’s Expanded Programme on Immunization (or EPI) Manager, as well as Vice Director of the National Institute of Hygiene and Epidemiology who you’ll hear from in a few minutes.
I really love the video you’ve just seen – because it highlights an extremely important area of work for us in WHO’s Viet Nam Country Office: making sure that every child, everywhere in Viet Nam is protected from vaccine-preventable diseases – but also some of the challenges and realities on the ground in making this happen.
I also love how, in a couple of brief minutes, the video also highlights some of Viet Nam’s incredible diversity. We are joining you from bustling, vibrant Ha Noi today, but much of Dak Nong province (where the video was shot) is paddy fields, jungles and rice-terraced mountains.
Along with its landscapes, the people of Viet Nam are also diverse, home to more than 50 ethnic groups, many of whom live in small villages in remote mountainous areas, far from paved roads. Like the people we saw in the video, they often spend time away from home, cultivating crops like coffee, pepper and rice.
Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, people in these communities were less likely than their lowland and urban counterparts to access essential health services like routine childhood immunization.
When the pandemic disrupted many routine health services, it exacerbated long-standing challenges that many of these communities had faced.
It was in this context that, when the emergency phase of the pandemic was over, WHO, the Ministry of Health and colleagues from the Tay Nguyen Institute of Hygiene and Epidemiology in the central highlands region of Viet Nam came together – to work on improving access to routine immunization for people in remote areas. As you saw in the video, health workers are now doing outreach to communities to catch up children who are behind on their schedules – and to reach children who have never benefited from vaccinations before.
We have also been ‘trying out’ using routine immunization as a platform for offering other services, like screening for hypertension and diabetes. Very simply, when a health team goes to a community to conduct routine childhood vaccinations, their parents or caregivers are offered blood pressure and blood glucose checks. We are already hearing how life-changing it is for people to be diagnosed and treated as a result of these checks, improving their overall health and well-being.
While we still have a long way to go for this work to have the kind of reach and impact that we are looking for, the early phases are promising and they are delivering exciting results – and I would like to acknowledge and thank the European Union and DFAT / the Australian Government for your support, which has enabled us to carry out this work.
And of course – much of this success is due to the enthusiasm and commitment of dedicated health care workers like Dr H’Tuy, herself from an ethnic minority community, who we met in the video.
The reason we wanted to share this story with you today, is because it links so perfectly to this year’s World Health Day theme – My Health, My Right.
Every child in every corner of every country deserves access to life-saving vaccines. Everyone who has a noncommunicable disease is entitled to testing and treatment, no matter where they live or what they earn – so that they can enjoy the highest attainable standard of health.
We have made incredible progress in improving health around the world, but we still have so much more we have to do.
For us here in Viet Nam, this World Health Day 2024 is a good moment to remind ourselves of the work still ahead of us to make sure that everyone, everywhere can live long, healthy, and happy lives. And we’re proud today to be able to share a small snippet of the work we are doing here, alongside our wonderful Ministry of Health colleagues and partners, to try to make this happen.
On that note, I want to close by wishing all of you a very happy and healthy World Health Day … and it is now my great pleasure to hand over to Dr Hong, who will speak on behalf of Viet Nam’s Ministry of Health.