JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

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Objective:

To establish if medical training in Vietnam has adapted to a new disease pattern emerging in a developing country economy, that of road trauma.

Methods:

A review of Vietnamese medical schools, Ministry of Health, and Ministry of Education and Training literature on trauma education.

Results:

The trauma training component in medical education in Vietnam has been improving but is patchy and inconsistent across the health sector. As the medical education system was appropriately initially oriented to a generalist community base, trauma training at an undergraduate level was minimal and less than 5% of total credit. At the post-graduate level, only two major specialties (surgery and anaesthesia) figures have a significant and increasing trauma training component ranging from 8% to 22% in academic and clinical training pathways. A new national examination is on the way to improve curricula and standards at an undergraduate level, post-graduate short courses like Basic Trauma Life Support-BLS, Primary Trauma Care-PTC are seen as a reasonable solution to address current Vietnamese medical education system deficiencies in trauma training.

Conclusions:

Although efforts have been made to reform the medical training program in Vietnam, it would take quite a long time to reach the complete transformation. In the interim, the implementation of short courses such as BLS, PTC should be considered as the appropriate method to compensate for the insufficient competency-related trauma care among healthcare workers outside of trauma specialist training.