President Võ Văn Thưởng visits officials of the Children’s Hospital No 1 in HCM City on Thursday morning.—VNA/VNS Photos Thống Nhất

HÀ NỘI — Doctors, nurses and medical staff of HCM City-based Children’s Hospital No 1 should always keep in their hearts a strong desire and love for their profession to better serve patients and continue to reap new success in caring for and protecting people's health.

President Võ Văn Thưởng made the statement on Thursday morning when he visited the hospital on the 69th anniversary of Vietnamese Doctors' Day (February 27, 1955 - February 27, 2024) in the city.

Thưởng also said “The medical profession is a noble profession because it protects people’s health, brings life to people, brings positive emotions to society, and brings families joy and happiness.”

But it was also a difficult profession, requiring constant effort to study and improve, he added.

The hospital should continue to expand international cooperation in the region and the world, make more efforts to enhance management efficiency in order to build a smart, friendly, green, clean and beautiful hospital fully applying scientific and technological achievements in management and treatment.

He ordered the head of the city, and relevant sectors to pay more attention to and improve the lives of doctors, nurses and medical staff; constantly upgrade medical facilities and equipment; focus on training the next generations of doctors, especially sending young doctors to gain medical experience in countries with developed medicine, to promote the achievements and traditions of the hospital in the future.

He also requested the hospital support lower-level hospitals in dealing with difficult cases, thereby improving the quality of the lower-level hospitals and reducing the overload for central hospitals, he said.

High appreciation

President Võ Văn Thưởng visits patients at the Children’s Hospital No 1 in HCM City on Thursday morning

Also at the visit, Thưởng highly appreciated the doctors, nurses and medical staff of the hospital.

He said the doctors, nurses and medical staff of the hospital were always united and confident in their expertise. They had a heart of love for patients, dared to think and dared to do for people's health.

As the leading hospital of the city and the country's southern region, the hospital's doctors and nurses had actively researched and built appropriate health care models for patients, even as there were many types of new diseases among children and the disease patterns of paediatric patients rapidly changed.

He said he acknowledged the hospital's reduction of the death rate, from 1.4 per cent in 2005 to only 0.3 per cent in 2023.

The hospital had made clear progress, recognised by the world and Vietnamese medical communities, typically, the success of the first foetal heart intervention case in Southeast Asia, he said.

“This is a manifestation of the spirit of daring to think and daring to do for the lives and health of patients,” he said.

In addition to statistics, the success of hospital was also based on the confidence in the expertise of doctors and nurses, and the desire to contribute to the health of children.

“Those are things that statistical reports cannot show,” he said.

60 years of development

The hospital was put into operation since 1956. Now it has 1,500 sickbeds with 1,768 doctors, nurses and medical staff.

During more than 60 years of development, the hospital has set the goal of developing specialised paediatrics with five priorities of neonatology, emergency resuscitation, interventional surgery, children's cardiology and infectious diseases.

In 2005, the hospital established the first neonatal intensive centre with new neonatal resuscitation techniques such as high frequency oscillation (HFO), whole-body cooling to treat encephalopathy due to lack of oxygen, and surgery for birth defects.

The hospital has an Emergency Treatment Intensive Care and Poison Control Centre with 70 sickbeds and modern resuscitation equipment, saving the lives of many seriously-ill patients, contributing to a significant reduction in child mortality rates.

The hospital has promoted the development of endoscopic surgery, thoracic surgery, neurosurgery, urology and maxillofacial surgery.

It also developed the Real-time PCR technique to isolate the Enterovirus 71 (EV71), reducing the diagnosis rate of encephalitis with unknown cause from 70 per cent to 30 per cent.

Notably, the hospital’s doctors coordinated with Từ Dũ Hospital’s doctors to successfully conduct an intervention of "cardiac catheterisation in the womb" for a foetus with severe congenital heart disease.

According to the city’s health department, the intervention was truly a new step forward in specialised techniques on par with developed countries in the region.

In the world, only a few countries such as Brazil and Poland have successfully implemented the technique. Countries in the region with many medical achievements have not implemented the technique so far.