Huynh Cong Hung, a member of the People’s Council, criticized that as many as 101 projects are still inactive, including 28 projects to build state-owned hospitals. He urged the city’s health officials to pinpoint reasons for this.

Hung said in the first half of this year, the health sector began work on only 31 projects, including many projects to acquire equipments for hospitals. Such a pace is unacceptable, though officials explained that many hospital projects were progressing slower than schedule because of problems with site clearance and administrative issues.

There are currently 32 state-owned and 32 private hospitals in the city, besides 13 centrally-governed hospitals, over 1,300 grassroots medical clinics and 322 medical stations.

Such facilities provide medical examination and treatment for 28 million outpatients and five million inpatients a year, with around 40% of them coming from provinces across the country.

Pham Viet Thanh, director of the HCMC Department of Health, pointed to foot-dragging site clearance and red tape in making investment procedures behind the slow progress.

“Site clearance and procedures are the complicated problems for any hospital projects in the city. We need more time to solve it. The process to map out and make procedures for each project is three to five years,” he said.

For example, Thanh said, the city government approved a plan to build hospitals in areas around the city’s gateways to reduce overload and traffic congestion in the city center and offer better health care service to residents in remote areas. Under the plan, the city had plans to start work on a children’s hospital, an eye hospital, and some others on September 2 but the schedule cannot be kept because of the prolonged site clearance, he said.

“The price of land as a condition to step up site clearance was just approved last week,” he lamented on complicated procedures.

Overload at hospitals and the poor provision of health services are making many local people spend more money on treatment in foreign countries.

“Our treatment method and professional quality are not lower than those in foreign countries but we are lacking good hospitals with full services to cater to the high demand of patients,” Thanh said.

Apart from the overload at hospitals, members of the city’s People Council on Thursday also focused on food safety and epidemic control issues.