Ministry introduces new quality criteria for private hospitals

The move came after the Social Security
decided that in 2018, private hospitals and healthcare clinics that wanted to
sign a contract with the agency to examine people with health insurance cards,
would have to show a legal document proving their quality under the ministry’s
standards.

Le Van Phuc, deputy head of the agency’s
department for health insurance implementation, said that based
on the classification, the agency could exactly calculate the rate of
health insurance fees it had to cover for a patient treated at a private
hospital or healthcare clinic instead of a public hospital or healthcare
clinic.

A health insurance cardholder has to register
one public hospital or health clinic to receive treatment before they started
to use the card. However, patients were sometimes examined and treated at
private hospitals and healthcare clinics instead of public hospitals and
healthcare clinics as registered.

Additionally, private hospitals and healthcare
clinics also want to examine and treat patients with health insurance cards.
Thus, they need to be classified at levels equal to public hospitals and
healthcare clinics so that the insurance agency can calculate the fees they
would cover, depending on the quality of and healthcare
clinics.

Deputy Minister Nguyen Viet Tien said that the
move was believed to assist private hospitals and health clinics to compete
fairly with public hospitals and healthcare clinics.

Under the ministry’s decision No 6062/QĐ-BYT
issued late December, the criteria to classify a private hospital includes the
number of sickbeds, the structuring of doctors and nurses, the quality of staff
– and  the quality of infrastructure and facilities. Private hospitals
would be classified at four levels. The highest rate is level one.

For example, a private hospital will be ranked
level one if it has more than 400 sickbeds, the number of nurses is double the
number of doctors, 60 percent of heads of  hospital departments graduate
with Ph.D degrees – and its facilities and infrastructure meet standards.

A private hospital will be ranked level two if
it has 100-400 sickbeds, the number of nurses is not double the number of
doctors and 20-60 percent of the heads of  hospital departments have MA
degrees.

A private hospital ranked level three would have
to have 30-100 sickbeds, the number of nurses was not double the number of
doctors and only 20 percent of heads of  its departments have MA degrees.

Other private hospitals belong to level four.

In the meantime, all private healthcare clinics
have been ranked level three.

It is estimated that the country has about 170
private hospitals, more than 30,000 private healthcare clinics and more than 76
million health insurance cardholders.-VNA