Health insurance reform in Vietnam: a review of recent developments and future challenges

Vietnam is undertaking health financing reform with a view to achieve universal coverage of health insurance within the coming years. To date, around half of the population is covered with some type of health insurance or prepayment. This review applies a conceptual framework of health financing to provide a coherent assessment of the reforms to date with respect to a set of key policy objectives of health financing, including financial sustainability, efficiency in service provision, and equity in health financing. Based on the assessment, the review discusses the main implications of the reforms focusing on achievements and remaining challenges, the nature of the Vietnamese reforms in an international perspective, and the role of the government. The main lessons from the Vietnamese experiences, from which other reforming countries may draw, are the need for sustained resource mobilization, comprehensive reform involving all functions of the health financing system, and to adopt a long-term view of health insurance reform. Future analysis should include continued evaluation of the reforms in terms of impacts on key outcomes and the political dimensions of health refor

Synthesis of bio-polyols by epoxide ring opening reaction with H2O as a reagent

The different nucleophilic reagents have been using in epoxide ring opening reactions among which water is the most preferable. At first, the epoxide group must be protonated by water in the presence of H2SO4 as catalyst. The successful epoxide ring opening reaction of epoxidized soybean oil (ESO) by water in the H2SO4 environment was verified by FTIR and H-NMR spectroscopy. The effect of reaction parameters like the amount of reagents, catalyst, temperature and time of a polyol synthesis were studied through the hydroxyl and oxirane oxygen content of product. Moreover, the impact of the parameters on the correlation P/E was determined by comparing a hydroxyl group formation to an epoxide group consumption. When the hydroxylation reaction was carried out with ESO:H2O mole ratio of 1:15; in 8 wt.% H2SO4; at temperature of 70 oC and in 5 hours, the hydroxyl content of 358.51 mgKOH/g of the obtained product was achieved. Keywords. Epoxidized vegetable oil, biopolyol, epoxide ring-opening, epoxidized soybean oil

The Improvement Model of Navigational Safety for Inland Waterway Transport

This paper aims at evaluating navigational safety for inland waterway transport (IWT). In doing so, the literature and operational features of IWT were initially reviewed to figure out risk elements (REs) influencing the navigational safety for IWT. After that, a fuzzy Analytic Hierarchical Process (AHP) approach was adopted to estimate the weight for the likelihood and consequence measures of REs. Then, continuous risk matrix (RM) was introduced to identify REs\u27 risk level. Lastly, to test the proposed research model\u27s applicability, IWT operators across Vietnam were empirically surveyed. The empirical findings could be useful for IWT operators in launching managerial policies to boost their navigational safety. Furthermore, the proposed risk evaluation framework may serve as a methodological reference in relevant literature

Chênh lệch tiền lương tại Đồng bằng sông Cửu Long dưới góc độ tiếp cận về giới tính và khu vực thành thị - nông thôn

This study analyzes the wage differential of male and female workers, and labor in urban and rural areas in the Mekong Delta provinces using the VHLSS 2014 data. The results of the decomposition of the wage disparity between men and women show unexplained difference has the major contribution in the wage gap between men and women, in particular the differences in the returns to academic and professional degrees for male and female workers. Meanwhile, the explained difference has lower explanatory power, suggesting that most of attributes of male and female labor do not significantly differ. The results of the decomposition of urban-rural wage differential show the opposite: the difference is mainly due to the fact that urban workers are more educated than rural labor, while the unexplained difference has lower explanatory power. Based on these results, the paper proposes a number of recommendations to reduce the income gap in the Mekong Delta

A Study Of UV-curable Offset Ink Emulsified With An Alternative Isopropyl Alcohol-free Fountain Solution

In the present research, fountain solution without isopropyl alcohol (IPA) for Ultraviolet offset curing ink (UV ink) was prepared by using Ethylene Glycol Mono-butyl Ether (EGME) as a substitute for IPA. The effect of EGME concentration on the water pick-up characteristics, tack value, rheological behaviors, and curing time of UV offset inks was investigated. Water pick-up characteristics, tack value and rheological behaviors were measured by Duke Ink water emulsification tester, Tack-o-scope and cone-plate rheometer, respectively. The curing time of the UV ink was evaluated by the rub test of printed sheet samples proofed on the polymer film at the standard solid ink density and the same ink thickness. The results revealed that an increase in EGME concentration increased the water pick-up characteristics of the UV ink. There was no significant influence of EGME on the tack value of UV inks. However, the tack value of UV ink was significantly affected by fountain concentration in UV inks and UV ink color. The addition of EGME reduced the dynamic viscosity and thixotropic property of UV inks but did not change the flow behavior of UV ink as shear thinning. This study indicates that UV ink emulsified with a higher EGME concentration fountain solution needs a longer curing time. The cyan UV ink has the longest curing time. Finally, the fountain solution of 10% EGME exhibited good performance in water pick-up characteristics, tack value, rheological behaviors, and curing time of UV inks

Facile Synthesis of Carbon Quantum Dots by Plasma-liquid Interaction Method

Carbon quantum dots (CQDs) are a novel type of fluorescent nano-materials with various unique properties. They are recently attracting enormous interest due to their superiority in water solubility, chemical inertness, low toxicity, ease of functionalization as well as resistance to photo-bleaching and potential applications in biomedical indication, photo-catalysis, energy conversion, optoelectronics, and sensing. In this work, we present a facile and environmentally friendly synthesis of CQDs based on plasma - liquid interaction method. This is a single-step method and does not use toxic chemicals. The size distribution of obtained CQDs is rather uniform at approximately 3 nm. The emission peak of CQDs shifts from 427 nm to 523 nm as the excitation wavelength is varied from 340 nm to 460 nm. The non-equilibrium reactive chemistry of plasma liquid interaction is responsible for acceleration of the CQDs formation process

Selective breeding of saline-tolerant striped catfish (Pangasianodon hypophthalmus) for sustainable catfish farming in climate vulnerable Mekong Delta, Vietnam

peer reviewedStriped catfish (Pangasianodon hypophthalmus), a freshwater species cultured mainly in the Mekong Delta region in Southern Vietnam, is facing a significant challenge due to salinity intrusion as a result of climatic changes. Given these evolving environmental conditions, selecting new strains with a higher salinity tolerance could make production of striped catfish economically feasible in brackish environments. In this study, we carried out a selection program aimed at developing a striped catfish strain able to survive and grow fast in a saline environment. To implement the selection program, we first collected males and females from different provinces in the Mekong delta. We next performed a factorial cross of these breeders to produce half- and full-sib families. When fish reached fry stage (47 dph), we put them in a saline environment (10 ppt) and subsequently kept 50 % of the fastest-growing fish after 143 days post hatching (dph). We repeated this mass selection procedure after 237 dph and 340 dph. We maintained in parallel a randomly selected group in saline conditions and a group of fish reared in freshwater to serve as controls. After crossing the selected individuals, we performed several tests on the next generation of fish to evaluate the effectiveness of selection after one generation in saline conditions. Average direct responses to selection were 18.0 % for growth and 11.4 % for survival rate after one generation of selection. We estimated a moderate realized heritability (0.29) for body weight. The genetic gains obtained in our study for body weight and survival rate after one generation of selection under saline conditions suggest that selection can be effective to improve ability of striped catfish to cope with saline stress. We conclude that our selection program has succeeded in developing a productive strain of striped catfish with better tolerance to salinity. © 2022 The Author

Long short-term memory (LSTM) neural networks for short-term water level prediction in Mekong river estuaries

This study firstly adopts a state-of-the-art deep learning approach based on a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) neural network for predicting the hourly water level of Mekong estuaries in Vietnam. The LSTM models were developed from around 8,760 hourly data points within 2018 and were evaluated using the Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency coefficient (NSE), mean absolute error (MAE), and root mean square error (RMSE). The results showed that the NSE values for the training and testing steps were both above 0.98, which can be regarded as very good performance. Furthermore, the RMSE were between 0.09 and 0.11 m for the training and between 0.10 and 0.12 m for the testing, while MAE for the training ranged from 0.07 to 0.08 m and varied from 0.08 to 0.10 m for the testing. The LSTM networks appear to enable high precision and robustness in water level time series prediction. The outcomes of this research have crucial implications in river water level predictions, especially from the viewpoint of employing deep learning algorithms