Building on BU GHC’s affiliated training programs with Vietnamese institutions and the resulting 1000+ first degree Family Medicine specialist physicians, additional thousands of FM-trained undergraduate medical students, and hundreds of 3-month short-course general and subspecialist physicians trained in FM, the World Bank has reported a breakthrough in scale-up of training numbers through the Health Professions Education and Training for Health Systems Reform Project (HPET). Nearly 9,000 additional health professionals have now been trained in the last year in primary health care (PHC), largely based on the Family Medicine curriculum introduced by BU GHC and implemented by BU GHC partners throughout Vietnam.
This is a vital time for demonstrating successful scale-up of such capacity in human resources for health specifically linked to PHC, as the world embarks on a new effort following the Astana Declaration on Primary Health Care in 2018 to promote universal health coverage and achieve the goal of health for all as envisioned in the Sustainable Development Goal for Health. As global entities endeavor to improve PHC through new partnerships such as the PHC Accelerator, the Global Action Plan, PHCPI and others, having lessons from and examples of successful scale-up in the critical area of PHC workforce will be essential in devising and implementing the meaningful, sustainable and transformative system strengthening efforts needed to ensure access to quality PHC for all. Already, important donors such as the EU and the Asia Development Bank are looking to this effort to model new investments aimed at further PHC system strengthening.
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