Fostering collaboration mechanism and information exchange among provinces and central animal health authority are keys to animal diseases control and prevention scheme. Having this concept in mind, FAO Viet Nam’s Emergency Centre for Transboundary Animal Diseases, in collaboration with the Department of Animal Health within the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (DAH – MARD), supported the 6 Regional Animal Health Offices (RAHO) to regularly meet provincial animal health authorities in their regions to strengthen animal disease monitoring, control and epidemiology capacity at the regional level.

With the financial support from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), a total of 130 technical staff of RAHOs and Sub-Department of Animal Health (SDAH) met in their respected region over the period of October and November 2018. The regional meetings shared knowledge and information of the animal disease situation, especially on the global and national Avian Influenza (AI) and the global African Swine Fever (ASF) situation with a special focus on China. Participants also discussed prevention and control measures in their provinces and ways to improve the current surveillance system. Particularly, the participants identified gaps and seeked ways to perform better within the new department structure. Moreover, they discussed ways to strengthen the use of VAHIS, the Veterinary Animal Health Information System (VAHIS) that was launched by MARD, FAO, and USAID in August 2018. As the last session of the regional meetings, FAO technical staff rolled out a survey to participants to assess the epidemiology capacity of the region.  

“Bringing animal health officers together and encouraging them to discuss about shortcomings and possible solutions really opened up a communal sphere, enabling joint communications and actions to move forward. We believe that these coordination efforts will eventually improve animal diseases detection and response capacity of RAHO and SDAH, and ultimately improve animal disease control in their regions” said the Pawin Padungtod, the Senior Technical Coordinator of FAO ECTAD Viet Nam.

As identified in the meetings, participants expressed the need to strengthen outbreak investigation skills at the District Veterinary Staff (DVS) level. Therefore, a training-of-trainers (TOT) workshop will be conducted in December 2018 to train 160 DVS by the TOT participants in early 2019. Furthermore, with the questionnaire database, an analysis of the epidemiology capacity and needs assessment to identify gaps in skills at provincial level will be conducted. Investigations to improve the use of VAHIS will be made and training and advocacy needs for VAHIS will be further explored in 2019.