A new care service can recruit enough workers to open and still have a workforce problem six months later. Some employees discover that the emotional and physical demands are greater than expected. Others leave for work offering better pay, more predictable hours or clearer progression. Experienced workers absorb additional responsibilities as vacancies appear. Families encounter unfamiliar caregivers, while managers spend increasing amounts of time recruiting replacements rather than developing the people already employed.
This is why workforce expansion and workforce sustainability are different challenges. As explored across the Vietnam Aging, Long-Term Care & Community Support Knowledge Hub, Vietnam is developing its response to rapid population ageing while formal long-term care remains relatively limited and families continue to provide most everyday support. The emergence of a larger care economy creates employment opportunities, but those opportunities will become sustainable services only if enough people regard care as work worth entering and a career worth remaining in.
UNFPA’s analysis of Vietnam’s care economy highlights the shortage of qualified caregivers, limited professionalisation and the need to create decent employment as demand grows. This matters because demographic change is occurring alongside urbanisation, migration, smaller households and increasing participation in formal employment. The same social changes that reduce the availability of unpaid family care also shape the labour market from which formal services must recruit.
The central workforce challenge is therefore not simply numerical. Vietnam needs recruitment, retention and service-development strategies that reinforce one another. A sector dependent on continual replacement can increase headcount without accumulating experience. A sustainable workforce grows capability as well as capacity.
Care competes within a changing Vietnamese labour market
Long-term care does not recruit workers in isolation. Potential employees compare care with employment in manufacturing, retail, hospitality, health services, administration and other parts of Vietnam’s expanding economy. Younger people also compare opportunities in their home province with those available in Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City and other urban centres.
This competition matters because care work can combine several characteristics that make recruitment difficult: intimate personal care, emotional responsibility, physical demands, irregular schedules and relatively limited occupational recognition. Where pay is also modest or progression unclear, an employer may be asking workers to accept demanding responsibilities without a sufficiently strong employment proposition.
Recruitment therefore begins before a vacancy is advertised. It begins with the design of the job.
A service that repeatedly struggles to recruit should examine whether the problem lies in labour supply, the role being offered or both. Advertising more frequently will not correct an unattractive schedule. A signing incentive will not compensate indefinitely for weak supervision. Training new entrants will not create stability if experienced workers see no reason to stay.
This distinction is particularly important in an emerging formal care market. Employment norms established while the sector is expanding can influence its future reputation. If early care jobs become associated with poor conditions and rapid turnover, later workforce expansion becomes harder. If they develop into recognised occupations with meaningful training and progression, the sector has a stronger platform from which to grow.
Recruitment needs to explain what care work actually offers
Care recruitment can easily focus on what applicants must provide: patience, compassion, flexibility and willingness to help older people. Those qualities matter, but recruitment also needs to explain what the occupation offers the worker.
For some people, care provides purposeful work and close human relationships. For others, it can provide an entry route into health, social care, rehabilitation or service leadership. Workers with family caregiving experience may already possess valuable interpersonal and practical skills that can be developed through formal training. Younger entrants may be attracted by an expanding sector if they can see credible development opportunities.
The strongest recruitment proposition therefore connects purpose with employment quality. It should make clear what the job involves, how workers are supported, what they will learn, what hours they can expect and where experience can lead.
This is the difference between filling vacancies and developing recruitment and onboarding models capable of supporting retention. Realistic recruitment reduces the likelihood that new employees enter with expectations that the job cannot meet.
Selection also matters. Care services need people who can communicate respectfully, learn from feedback, recognise boundaries and respond calmly to changing situations. Previous formal experience can be useful, but an emerging sector should not unnecessarily exclude people whose capabilities have developed through family care, community work or another service occupation.
Recruitment should identify potential as well as credentials, provided that competence is then developed and assessed appropriately.
Scenario: recruitment numbers look strong until the first three months
A growing private home-care service in Ho Chi Minh City recruits 25 caregivers to support expansion into several new districts. Initial recruitment appears successful. Applicants respond quickly, induction is completed and most vacancies are filled.
Within three months, however, eight workers have left. Exit discussions reveal different reasons, but several themes recur. Travel between households takes longer than expected. Evening and weekend schedules interfere with family responsibilities. New workers feel anxious when supporting people with substantial dependency alone. Several had understood the role primarily as companionship and household assistance but encountered increasingly complex personal care.
The provider initially considers another recruitment campaign. Instead, it examines the first 90 days as a workforce pathway.
Job information is rewritten to describe responsibilities more realistically. New starters shadow experienced staff before lone working. Supervisors make structured contact during the first weeks rather than waiting for problems to be reported. Scheduling is reviewed geographically, and workers supporting more complex needs receive additional preparation.
Recruitment becomes slightly more selective and therefore produces fewer immediate hires. Retention improves because the people who join understand the work and encounter support consistent with what they were promised.
The operational lesson is significant: vacancy filling is a weak measure of recruitment success. For a developing Vietnamese care market, the more meaningful question is how many recruits become competent, established workers six or twelve months later.
Retention begins with the everyday experience of work
Workers rarely experience “workforce strategy” directly. They experience a rota, a supervisor, colleagues, workload, pay, travel, training and whether someone responds when they say a situation is becoming unsafe.
Retention is therefore created through ordinary operational decisions.
A worker may value the purpose of care but leave because shifts change unpredictably. Another may tolerate modest starting pay while learning but leave when additional responsibilities bring no progression. An experienced employee may remain through difficult periods if they trust their supervisor and feel respected, yet leave after repeated concerns about staffing are ignored.
The wider issue of retention, burnout and moral injury is particularly relevant to care because workers can experience tension between the care they believe a person needs and the time or resources available to provide it.
This is not simply a wellbeing issue. It affects quality and continuity. Workers who are persistently rushed may complete essential tasks while losing the relational elements that help them notice subtle deterioration, understand preferences or prevent isolation.
Organizations examining workforce instability can use the Predictive Workforce Risk Module to structure analysis of turnover, vacancies, retention and service-continuity risks. It is not a Vietnamese labour-market instrument, but it illustrates an important management principle: workforce problems should be identified through patterns before they become service failures.
Pay matters, but the employment proposition is wider than wages
It would be unrealistic to discuss care-worker retention without pay. Compensation affects whether workers can afford to remain in the occupation and how society signals the value of their work.
But retention is rarely explained by salary alone. Two jobs offering similar pay can produce very different experiences depending on hours, travel, predictability, supervision, workload, social insurance arrangements, training and opportunities for progression.
This is where the concept of decent work becomes useful. International Labour Organization analysis of the care economy connects high-quality care with fair employment, social protection, safe working conditions, skills development and sustainable careers. That international principle is relevant to Vietnam without prescribing a particular wage or employment model.
For Vietnam, the employment mix is also likely to remain diverse. Formal caregivers may work for private nursing facilities, home-care businesses, social assistance institutions, charitable organisations or emerging community services. Some support may continue to be purchased directly by households. Employment conditions can therefore vary substantially.
The policy challenge is not to pretend that every setting can immediately offer identical terms. It is to recognise that expansion based on persistently weak employment conditions creates its own capacity ceiling.
If formal care is to substitute for some of the unpaid work that families can no longer provide, the paid workforce needs employment sufficiently sustainable to remain available.
Care careers need to reward staying as well as joining
Article 17 in this series examined professionalisation and career development in detail. Recruitment and retention add another question: does progression actually create a reason to remain in the sector?
A career structure becomes meaningful when additional competence, experience and responsibility produce visible opportunity. That may include specialist practice, mentoring, coordination, supervision or progression into relevant professional education.
Without such routes, experienced workers can reach an occupational ceiling quickly. The rational response may then be to leave care for another sector.
This makes career pathways and progression a retention mechanism as much as a training issue. A worker should be able to imagine what remaining in care for five years might mean.
Crucially, progression should not require everyone to become a manager. Long-term care benefits from highly experienced practitioners who continue working directly with older and disabled people. Specialist and practice-based progression can retain that expertise close to the people who benefit from it.
Continuity makes retention a care-quality issue
Turnover has organisational costs, but its most important consequences are experienced by people receiving care.
Long-term support depends heavily on accumulated knowledge. An experienced caregiver learns how a person communicates discomfort, which routines reduce anxiety, how much assistance preserves independence and when a small change is unusual. Some of this can be documented. Much of it develops through repeated interaction.
When workers change constantly, relationships repeatedly restart.
This is especially significant for people living with dementia, communication difficulties or substantial dependency. An unfamiliar worker may technically complete the required activities while missing the personal knowledge that makes support reassuring and effective.
Workforce continuity therefore belongs within the broader agenda of quality, safety and safeguarding in aging services. High turnover can weaken informal observation, make emerging risks harder to detect and place additional pressure on relatives who repeatedly explain the person’s needs to new staff.
Providers should consequently examine turnover alongside continuity measures rather than treating it solely as a human-resources metric. The relevant questions include how frequently people experience different workers, whether key information survives staff changes, whether departures concentrate in particular teams and whether incidents increase during periods of workforce instability.
This changes the business case for retention. The value of an experienced worker includes not only avoided recruitment expenditure but preserved knowledge, relationships and service reliability.
Scenario: one resignation reveals a continuity dependency
An older man living with Parkinson’s disease receives home support from the same caregiver on most weekday mornings. Over many months she learns how his mobility varies, how much time he needs before attempting to stand and which changes should be reported to his daughter and health professionals.
When the worker resigns, the provider discovers how much of that knowledge depends upon her. Written records contain tasks and basic preferences but not the practical detail she has accumulated.
Several replacement workers cover the visits. His daughter begins attending more frequently because she lacks confidence that each worker understands his routine. One morning he becomes unsteady during a transfer. No serious injury occurs, but the incident exposes a continuity risk.
The provider responds in two ways. It strengthens handover information so that essential person-specific knowledge is not held by one employee, and it examines why the original worker left. Her reasons include unpredictable weekend duties and no clear route into a senior practice role despite several years of experience.
The organisation creates a more structured progression route and begins monitoring continuity alongside vacancies and turnover.
The scenario illustrates why retention and resilience need to be considered together. Services should not become dangerously dependent on one worker, but neither should continuity be treated as interchangeable staffing. Stable relationships have genuine care value.
Scheduling can determine whether a care job is sustainable
Home-based care presents a particular operational challenge because paid working time and visible care time are not the same thing. Workers may travel between households, experience cancellations or encounter visits that take longer because a person’s condition has changed.
A schedule that appears efficient on paper can become exhausting in practice.
Vietnam’s dense cities and geographically dispersed rural areas create different versions of this problem. Urban workers may encounter congestion and substantial travel between clients. Rural workers may cover longer distances where formal services are sparse.
Scheduling therefore influences both productivity and retention. If travel is systematically underestimated, workers absorb the discrepancy through rushed visits, unpaid time, missed breaks or lateness. If schedules contain little flexibility, one person’s unexpected need can disrupt the remainder of a shift.
The operational discipline of workforce scheduling and capacity operations becomes increasingly important as home-care markets expand. Good scheduling considers geography, complexity, continuity and worker capability rather than simply filling every available time slot.
Technology can help. Routing tools, mobile records and demand forecasting can reduce administrative friction and identify inefficient patterns. But technology cannot make an impossible workload achievable. Algorithms also need safeguards against optimising schedules so tightly that human variability disappears from the model.
Care is not a delivery route in which every stop can reliably be completed in the same number of minutes.
Supervision is one of the strongest retention infrastructures
Care workers frequently operate close to uncertainty. An older person becomes more confused. A relative asks the worker to undertake something outside their role. A person refuses support. A worker witnesses family conflict or becomes concerned about neglect.
The quality of supervision determines whether those experiences become manageable professional challenges or reasons to leave.
Supportive supervision provides workers with somewhere to escalate uncertainty, learn from difficult situations and receive feedback. It also gives organisations intelligence about emerging service pressures.
For new workers, frequent contact during the first months can be particularly important. Waiting for a formal annual review is poorly matched to a role in which confidence develops through repeated practice.
Supervision also helps prevent experienced workers from becoming the invisible shock absorbers of understaffed services. Reliable employees often receive the most difficult cases because managers trust them. Without monitoring, competence can therefore generate additional burden rather than reward.
The wider practice of supervision, reflective practice and coaching should consequently be understood as workforce infrastructure. Its purpose extends beyond correcting performance. It supports judgement, wellbeing, learning and organisational awareness.
Where turnover begins rising, leaders should examine supervisory capacity itself. A manager responsible for too many workers may have little opportunity to provide meaningful support even where policy requires it.
Rural recruitment cannot rely on urban workforce assumptions
Vietnam’s workforce geography matters. Formal long-term care services, specialist education and employment opportunities are not distributed evenly, while internal migration can draw younger working-age adults towards economically dynamic urban areas.
Rural communities can therefore experience two connected pressures: fewer relatives available to provide daily care and a smaller labour pool from which to develop formal services.
Recruiting workers from elsewhere is one response, but it may be expensive and unstable. A stronger long-term strategy also develops local capacity.
Community-based roles can provide an entry point, particularly where workers already have trusted relationships and knowledge of local culture. Training can then develop those capabilities into more formal responsibilities where services and financing permit.
However, rural care should not become a lower-standard version of urban provision. Geographic flexibility in how training, supervision and specialist support are delivered should not mean weaker expectations of safety or competence.
The challenge is especially relevant to rural and underserved communities. Remote supervision, regional training partnerships and mobile specialist support may extend professional infrastructure, but workers still need practical support and credible escalation routes.
Scenario: a rural service cannot recruit its way out of the problem
A community-based organisation in a rural province wants to expand support for older people whose adult children have migrated for employment. It repeatedly advertises for experienced caregivers but attracts few applicants. Those who do apply often live too far away for short home-care visits to be economically practical.
The organisation changes its workforce model rather than simply increasing advertising.
It identifies local residents already involved in community and family support who are interested in paid care work. Entry-level training is provided locally. More experienced staff from a regional centre undertake scheduled supervision, while remote contact provides additional support between visits. Workers are grouped geographically to reduce travel.
Not every need can be supported locally. People requiring more complex nursing or rehabilitation input still need access to appropriate health professionals, and escalation pathways remain essential. The objective is not to replace specialists with community workers.
Over time, the organisation develops a small local workforce whose employment is viable because schedules are geographically coherent and training does not require permanent migration.
The model also creates a governance question. If local demand grows faster than the workers’ competence or supervisory infrastructure, expansion must slow or additional expertise must be introduced. Sustainable recruitment depends on matching workforce growth with the systems required to support it.
Gender must be visible in workforce strategy
Care in Vietnam remains strongly gendered. UNFPA’s care-economy analysis reports that women constitute the large majority of family caregivers, reflecting wider expectations about who provides support within households. Formalising care can create employment opportunities for women, but it can also reproduce the same inequalities inside paid work.
A woman employed as a caregiver may still carry substantial unpaid responsibilities for children, older relatives and household work. Unpredictable shifts or inflexible schedules can therefore push precisely the workers the sector is trying to retain out of employment.
This creates an important distinction. Expanding paid care work is not automatically gender-transformative. Employment quality determines whether formalisation creates sustainable economic opportunity or simply transfers undervalued care from unpaid households into low-status jobs.
Men should also not be treated as peripheral to future workforce development. Broadening the demographic profile of care work can increase labour supply and challenge assumptions that intimate or relational support is inherently women’s work.
The larger objective is a workforce strategy that recognises care as skilled employment rather than a formal extension of gendered family obligation.
Providers need to know why workers leave
Turnover data is useful only when organisations learn from it.
A single annual turnover percentage can hide very different problems. High departure rates among new starters may indicate unrealistic recruitment, weak onboarding or poor early support. Departures among experienced staff may suggest workload, pay compression or blocked progression. Turnover concentrated under one supervisor may indicate a local management issue. Seasonal departures may reveal scheduling or labour-market competition.
Useful workforce intelligence therefore combines several signals:
- vacancy levels and time required to recruit;
- turnover by role, location and length of service;
- retention at early milestones such as three, six and twelve months;
- sickness, overtime and repeated schedule disruption;
- training, supervision and progression patterns; and
- continuity, quality and incident measures experienced by people receiving care.
This is the practical value of workforce retention analytics and insight. Data should lead to a diagnosis rather than simply a dashboard.
The Quality Dashboard Builder can help organisations considering similar questions place workforce measures alongside service indicators. It is not a national Vietnamese reporting framework; its usefulness lies in preventing workforce performance from being examined separately from care quality.
Workforce planning needs to anticipate demand rather than follow vacancies
Recruitment becomes increasingly difficult when organisations begin only after capacity has already been lost. The same principle applies at system level.
Vietnam’s demographic trajectory provides substantial advance warning. UNFPA’s 2025 care-economy study, drawing on the Vietnam National Aging Survey 2022 and population projections, estimates that the number of older people needing assistance with activities of daily living could increase from approximately 4.7 million in 2025 to around 6.5 million by 2035.
That does not translate directly into 6.5 million people requiring paid caregivers. Much support will continue to come from families, communities, health services and assistive approaches, and the intensity of need varies considerably. It does, however, indicate the direction of demand.
Workforce planning should therefore connect demographic need with assumptions about future service models. A system centred predominantly on institutional care would require one workforce configuration. Expansion of home and community support would require another. Greater use of rehabilitation, dementia support and integrated long-term care would change skill requirements again.
This is why workforce data and capacity planning cannot be reduced to counting current employees.
Planning needs to consider recruitment pipelines, training capacity, geographic distribution, expected attrition, skill mix, supervision and the proportion of demand likely to remain with unpaid caregivers.
Vietnam is already examining the future architecture of care. In 2025, UNFPA sought technical support for a master plan concerning the development and improvement of community-based health care workers and health care facilities for older people to 2030 with a vision to 2045. In 2026, further work is generating evidence on preferences, care needs and willingness to pay to inform development of a National Long-Term Care Strategy.
These developments should be understood as policy and system-development work rather than evidence that a comprehensive national long-term care workforce system is already operating. The distinction matters because future workforce requirements will depend heavily on what service and financing architecture ultimately develops.
Family caregivers remain part of the workforce equation
Formal workforce planning can become misleading if it counts only paid employees.
Most long-term support in Vietnam continues to be provided within families. UNFPA’s care-economy analysis describes home-based care as the predominant model and identifies women as the majority of family caregivers. This unpaid workforce absorbs demand that would otherwise require formal services.
But family capacity is not unlimited. Migration, smaller households, employment and changing living arrangements can reduce the amount of care relatives can provide. Some caregivers also experience financial strain, reduced employment and substantial emotional or physical burden.
Formal workforce development and family caregiver capacity and burden are therefore connected. A family reaching exhaustion can create sudden demand for paid support. Conversely, reliable formal services can allow relatives to remain involved without carrying every element of care themselves.
The strongest future model is unlikely to involve formal services replacing families wholesale. More plausibly, professional workers, community resources and relatives will share responsibility in different proportions according to need, affordability and local availability.
That means workforce forecasts should test different assumptions about family contribution rather than treating unpaid care as a permanent, cost-free constant.
Scenario: retention support prevents a family care breakdown
An older woman with increasing frailty lives with her daughter, who works during the day. A paid caregiver visits regularly and has developed a strong understanding of the older woman’s mobility, diet and preferences.
The caregiver considers leaving because her working day contains several widely separated visits and too much unpaid travel. If she leaves, the provider can probably send replacements, but continuity will be weaker and the daughter expects that she will need to reduce her own working hours while new workers become familiar with her mother.
The provider’s scheduling data shows that several workers in the same area face similar travel problems. Rather than treating the potential resignation as an isolated employment matter, managers redesign local rounds so that visits are clustered more efficiently.
The caregiver remains. Her travel burden falls, and the older woman retains a familiar worker. The daughter can continue working.
No major new service has been created, yet the impact extends beyond employee retention. Better workforce design protects the older person’s continuity, the daughter’s labour-market participation and the provider’s capacity.
This illustrates why care-workforce policy belongs within a wider care-economy strategy. The conditions under which one person provides paid care can affect whether another person is able to remain in paid employment at all.
Technology should reduce friction rather than intensify work
Digital systems can make care jobs easier or harder.
Used well, technology can reduce repetitive administration, improve access to care information, optimise travel, simplify communication and allow workers in remote areas to obtain specialist advice. Digital learning can make development opportunities more accessible.
Used poorly, the same systems can create additional documentation, intrusive monitoring or unrealistic productivity expectations.
The difference depends on design and governance. A scheduling platform that reduces unnecessary travel supports workers. One that automatically compresses every available minute into direct-care activity may increase pressure. Mobile documentation that removes duplicate records can improve productivity; documentation layered on top of existing paper processes may simply add work.
Workers should therefore participate in the design and evaluation of technology that shapes their jobs. Their experience can reveal operational friction that management data alone misses.
Technology also creates new competency requirements. Workers need confidence with digital records, privacy expectations, remote communication and any assistive technologies used by the people they support. Digital transformation consequently shifts workforce demand rather than eliminating it.
The future care workforce may become more productive through technology, but sustainable productivity should mean reducing avoidable work and improving coordination, not extracting ever more activity from each employee.
Retention needs governance visibility
High turnover can become normalised when services remain open despite constant workforce replacement. Managers fill shifts, people continue receiving some support and the organisation appears operational.
Governance needs to look beneath that surface.
Leaders should understand where turnover is concentrated, why workers leave, whether vacancies affect continuity, how reliance on overtime changes, whether supervisory capacity remains sufficient and whether workforce instability is associated with complaints, incidents or deteriorating outcomes.
The relevant response is not always a retention initiative. Evidence may point towards pay, scheduling, management, training, workload, service design or local labour-market conditions. Governance should ensure that the organisation identifies the cause before selecting the intervention.
Organizations exploring how responsibility for workforce risk reaches senior decision-makers can use the Governance Maturity Assessment to structure questions about ownership, evidence and escalation. It does not establish Vietnamese employment standards; it provides a general framework for examining whether important operational risks remain visible at the level where resources and strategy are decided.
At a wider system level, workforce evidence can also inform education capacity, regional planning and future long-term care policy. Persistent recruitment difficulty in one province may indicate a different problem from national labour shortage. Local pay competition, transport, migration or limited training access may be more important.
Good governance therefore avoids treating every vacancy as evidence of the same workforce problem.
A sustainable workforce also needs sustainable providers
Employment quality cannot be separated indefinitely from provider economics.
A care organisation can improve wages, training, supervision and staffing resilience only if its income can sustain those costs. In a system where much formal care is privately purchased and household affordability varies substantially, this creates a difficult balance.
Low prices can make services accessible while producing insufficient revenue for stable employment. Higher prices may support better jobs but exclude families unable to pay. Charitable or community models can extend access but also require dependable resources if paid roles are to be sustained.
Vietnam’s future long-term care financing arrangements will therefore shape its labour market. If formal care expands, the relationship between public support, household expenditure, social protection, provider financing and workforce standards will become increasingly important.
This is part of the broader question of provider finance, cost controls and sustainability. Workforce expectations that are disconnected from provider economics can exist on paper without becoming durable employment.
The reverse is equally important. A business model that depends structurally on very low pay and constant turnover may remain financially viable in a narrow accounting sense while producing unstable care.
Sustainable long-term care financing therefore needs to recognise labour as core service infrastructure rather than a cost to be continually compressed.
International experience points towards retention, not permanent replacement
Many countries with mature long-term care sectors continue to struggle with recruitment and retention. Formalising a care system does not automatically resolve workforce instability, and wealthier systems can still experience low occupational status, turnover, burnout and geographic shortages.
Vietnam therefore has an opportunity to learn not only from international workforce structures but from their persistent weaknesses.
The transferable lesson is not that Vietnam should replicate another country’s staffing ratios, qualification system or immigration policy. Institutional conditions, labour markets, financing and family structures differ too substantially.
The more relevant principle is that a care system cannot recruit its way indefinitely out of poor retention. Countries that repeatedly replace departing workers lose experience faster than training systems can build it.
Vietnam’s emerging care economy can place retention closer to the beginning of system design. That means examining decent work, progression, supervision, workload and continuity while formal services are expanding rather than treating them as later corrections to an established market.
The ILO’s international work on the care economy reinforces the connection between quality care and decent work. Vietnam’s implementation will necessarily be its own, shaped by domestic labour institutions, economic development, family expectations and the evolving architecture of long-term care.
Conclusion
Vietnam’s long-term care workforce challenge will not be solved by finding a sufficiently large pool of people willing to become caregivers. The more important question is whether care can develop into employment in which capable people want to remain.
That requires recruitment based on realistic expectations, onboarding that supports the transition into practice, employment conditions compatible with workers’ lives, supervision that makes difficult work manageable and career structures that recognise accumulated expertise. Pay matters, but so do scheduling, occupational status, workload, development and the everyday experience of being valued.
The consequences extend well beyond the workforce itself. Retention protects relationships and person-specific knowledge. It reduces the burden on families repeatedly compensating for service instability. It gives providers a stronger base from which to develop quality and specialist capability. At system level, it allows investment in training to accumulate rather than continually replacing expertise that has been lost.
Vietnam’s evolving long-term care policy creates an opportunity to connect workforce planning with the future design and financing of services. Demographic demand can increasingly be anticipated; workforce capacity therefore needs to be built before shortages become embedded.
The strongest measure of progress will not simply be how many care jobs Vietnam creates. It will be whether those jobs become sustainable careers capable of supporting dignified, reliable and increasingly skilled care as the country ages.