Strengthening Public Health Management Capacity in Vietnam: Preparing Local Public Health Workers for New Roles in a Decentralized Health System

Abstract

Health sector decentralization has created an urgent need to strengthen public health management capacity in many countries throughout the developing world. This article describes the establishment of a national management training network in Vietnam that used Project-Based Learning to strengthen management competencies of HIV program workers and linked training to measurable improvement in HIV/AIDS public health program outcomes. Skills were taught using a combination of classroom learning and mentored fieldwork. From 2005 to 2015, 827 HIV/AIDS program managers were trained with this method throughout Vietnam by trainers in 3 regional training centers. A total of 218 applied learning projects were carried out by trainees during this period; 132 resulted in measurable improvements in HIV/AIDS program outputs, and 86 produced well-organized plans for implementing, monitoring, and evaluating HIV/AIDS intervention strategies. Vietnam's management training network represents an important advancement in public health workforce development that helps prepare workers for new roles and responsibilities in a decentralized health system.

Analysing public sector institutional capacity for health workforce governance in the South-East Asia region of WHO

“…This heterogeneity in size most probably reflects differences in the population size of countries and in roles, both in respect of functions and in terms of different division of responsibilities between units at the national level vis-a-vis equivalent bodies at the sub-national levels in the context of decentralized or devolved health systems, which is the typical situation in large and/ or federal countries. The opportunities, implications and drawbacks of decentralization of HRH functions have been discussed elsewhere [17–19]. But there is a need, across different country contexts, to align staffing of HRH units with expected functions; an appropriate functional allocation of staff is as important as the overall size and composition.…”