Vietnam hospitals redirect cancer patients as PET/CT drugs run short
Cancer imaging capacity in southern Vietnam is being constrained by drug supply, with hospitals sending patients elsewhere despite having PET/CT equipment.
Hospitals need radiopharmaceuticals to perform the combined diagnostic procedure. Cancer patients in Ho Chi Minh City face travel to Hanoi, Da Nang or other locations for scans because of supply disruptions. The commercial bottleneck sits upstream of the scanner, in the production and delivery of its essential consumable.
At a press conference in October, Nguyen Thanh Lam, deputy director of the Ministry of Health’s Drug Administration Department, said the agency was reviewing supplies, including cancer medicines and radioactive drugs. The Department of Medical Examination and Treatment Management has also requested hospital reports on radiopharmaceutical supply and use.
For hospital owners, buying a scanner and securing usable scanning capacity are separate investment tasks. Equipment spending needs a dependable drug supply behind it. When that supply fails, referrals transfer diagnostic demand to another provider while the original hospital loses opportunities to recover its investment through PET examinations.
The delivery constraint is physical. Fluorine-18, the isotope used to produce FDG for PET/CT imaging, has a half-life of approximately 110 minutes. Its remaining radioactivity halves over that interval and continues falling during transport, limiting the usefulness of long delivery routes.
That makes dependable production close enough to the customer central to the investment case. A supplier’s value lies in delivering usable activity at the appointed time. For hospitals, scheduling scans around reliable deliveries can be as consequential as the scanner’s technical capabilities.
Shared production needs dependable delivery
Mai Trong Khoa, former deputy director of Bach Mai Hospital, proposed central radiopharmaceutical production facilities serving several hospitals within a region. He said a cyclotron is expensive and requires advanced technical expertise, making a unit at every hospital unnecessary.
Shared production offers a way to spread the cost across hospital customers. Its weakness is concentration: a production interruption can disrupt several customers together. The strongest commercial arrangement combines dependable output with workable delivery routes and contingency supply, so a hospital’s appointment book is less exposed to a single facility.
Procurement also needs attention. Lam identified bidding, purchasing and planning as possible causes of hospital drug shortages. For operators, these are different problems from a production outage. Repairing equipment will accomplish little if a hospital cannot order and receive the resulting medicine in time.
Ho Chi Minh City’s Department of Health repeatedly submitted proposals during 2024–2026 for appraisal of investment in a cyclotron at Oncology Hospital’s Branch 2. The proposed facility would produce radiopharmaceuticals for PET/CT scans.
New production capacity offers a route towards local supply, but the return depends on commissioning and sustained deliveries. Restoring an existing supplier may offer a different cost and timetable. Investment decisions need to compare the expense of each route against the scans it can reliably support.
For patients, referrals move the journey as well as the examination. For receiving hospitals, additional demand is valuable only when drug deliveries can support it. The next commercial milestone is dependable supply reaching booked patients; approval of another machine purchase leaves that operating requirement intact.