Vietnam Dental Project update
Of late, this on-going project has been flying under the radar for most members of the club. Since its inception, it has grown and evolved to the extent that the original focus of providing disease prevention and primary care for rural school children has ended, perhaps temporarily, while the tutoring visits to Vietnam’s main dental hospital has gone from strength to strength.
At the time of the first working visit in January, 1992, the only formality for professional competence was a handshake. Visa requirements themselves changed every year throughout the 1990s. Now there is a protracted and expensive series of steps to prove currency of qualifications. It used to require university degrees but now its annual registration certificates all officially translated and witnessed over here.
On top of that the Vietnamese Ministry of Health takes 45 days to process each application for temporary registration and it’s this delay which has caused the demise of the rural teams. Volunteers need to plan about six months in advance regarding blocking off appointment books etc. Then flight bookings and payments have to be completed about three months in advance. Further, each Province (State) has to wait until the Ministry in Hanoi forwards clearance for each volunteer. This Kafka-esque state of affairs meant that in 2023 our rural team turned up but was not allowed to work in the designated Province; expenses, waste of time and loss of income, and frustration all boiled over. A solution has not yet been found.
Meanwhile the city-based specialists who work in a Ministry of Health establishment avoid some, but not all, of the bureaucratic steps. In 2025 there will be a team of 12 specialists working for one week at the National Hospital of OdontoStomatology (NHOS). The week will conclude with a day long conference/seminar. The timing of May is to coincide with the 50th anniversary of Reunification and 45th anniversary of the NHOS. There was a small surgical hospital which predated NHOS but many, indeed most, institutions in the old South Vietnam were closed down for a while to reopen later “under new management”.
And so, the RAVDHP continues, having escaped “founder dependency”. It has now become an integral annual fixture in the NHOS calendar and it will no doubt continue to evolve according to the needs and wishes of Australian and Vietnamese management.