Vietnam’s Ministry of Health has put out a draft plan to build its medical tourism trade around hospital-resort complexes, Lao Dong reported. This draft covers the 2025 to 2030 period, and the ministry is taking feedback on it before the text is settled. Its stated aim runs two ways: to draw more international patients to Vietnam, and to keep the affluent Vietnamese patients who now travel abroad for treatment at home.
Lao Dong, a labour newspaper, said the draft sets a target of building hospital-hotel-resort medical tourism models in at least five localities by 2030. Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, Da Nang, Quang Ninh and Khanh Hoa are the five named, each chosen for the tourism base it already has. The draft also aims to accredit at least 15 hospitals to international standards, five of them public. Alongside the buildings, the ministry wants a set of service packages that pair high-tech treatment, traditional medicine and resort stays.
The figure the plan is built to reverse is a domestic one. About 40,000 high-income Vietnamese travel abroad for medical treatment each year, Lao Dong reported, and that outflow carries foreign currency out of the country with it. The draft frames the loss as one of money and standing together. Vietnam has advanced in areas such as robotic surgery and organ transplantation, the paper said, yet it still lags on aligning with international standards, on insurance cover and on attracting senior foreign doctors.
A pilot before a rollout
Lao Dong reported that the ministry has split the work into two phases. The first runs from 2025 to 2027. It is a pilot that introduces 10 to 15 specialised service packages for controlled testing before any wider launch, Lao Dong reported. A second phase, from 2027 to 2030, scales the packages across the country and ties them to international insurers so that foreign patients can be billed more easily.
On the revenue case, the ministry’s own numbers are modest against the ambition. Vietnam’s medical tourism generated about 700 million US dollars in 2024, Lao Dong reported, and the ministry projects that figure to reach nearly 4 billion dollars by 2033, a yearly growth rate near 18 per cent. That path has been set out before. Health Tourism News has covered Vietnam’s stated target of 4 billion dollars by 2033 and the investment case behind it. Vietnam’s 700 million dollar base and its 18 per cent rate are the numbers to hold against later figures.
The resort model
The draft’s clearest example is already open. Vinmec Ocean Park 2 Hospital, in Hung Yen, runs a recovery model in which patients stay in a villa with 24-hour monitoring rather than on a ward, Lao Dong reported. Prof Dr Doan Quoc Hung, the hospital’s director, described the closed medical complex as “a specific step to concretize the health tourism development roadmap” for 2025 to 2030. Vinmec Ocean Park 2 Hospital covers more than 31,000 square metres, with 114 inpatient beds and 14 departments, and keeps examination, surgery and recovery on one campus.
Doan Quoc Hung framed the complex as a way to lift both service quality and economic growth. The ministry’s wider push, he said, is to fold health services into tourism so that domestic and foreign visitors come to Vietnam for care rather than leave it. The resort format is meant to give recovering patients somewhere to stay that earns its keep, rather than a hospital bed that does not.
Announcement against capacity
A drafting document is not an accredited hospital. The plan names five localities, a 15-hospital accreditation target and a 4 billion dollar figure, and each of those stays a claim until it is built and counted. Vietnam’s underlying advantages are real enough: costs below Western prices, a trained workforce, and a tourism base to recover in. The gap is the one the draft itself lists, in standards, insurance and senior staff, and none of those closes on a drafting timetable. Medical tourism rewards capacity that patients can verify, not roadmaps, and the pilot phase is where the two will first be tested against each other.
Test dates are already on the plan. The pilot’s 10 to 15 packages are due between 2025 and 2027, the 15 hospital accreditations and the five hospital-resort localities are 2030 targets, and the revenue claim runs to 2033. Whether the accreditations arrive, and whether the 40,000 high-income Vietnamese who travel abroad start to fall in number, will show in the figures well before the resort buildings do.
