Climate-Resilient Healthcare Supply Chains in Viet Nam: Balancing Reliability, Patient Safety, and Lower-Carbon Procurement
IMPLEMENTATION INSIGHTS
Climate-Resilient Healthcare Supply Chains in Viet Nam: Balancing Reliability, Patient Safety, and Lower-Carbon Procurement
IMPLEMENTATION INSIGHTS · CLIMATE-RESILIENT HEALTHCARE
Last reviewed: October 23, 2026
A hospital considering a new supplier of medical consumables may have several reasons to explore alternatives. Its existing supplier may have experienced delivery delays, prices may have increased, or another manufacturer may be offering a product with less packaging and a reportedly lower carbon footprint.
At first, the decision may appear to involve comparing prices, technical specifications, and delivery commitments. In practice, the questions are more complicated. Will the alternative product work safely with existing equipment? Can the supplier maintain consistent availability? Does the environmental claim apply to the specific product being purchased, and is there reliable evidence to support it?
A change that appears beneficial in one area may create problems elsewhere. Additional inventory can protect against shortages but may also increase expiry-related waste. A second distributor may offer another purchasing option while relying on the same manufacturer. A product with lower reported emissions may require different consumables, training, or maintenance arrangements that affect its overall suitability.
For healthcare organizations in Viet Nam, the challenge is not simply to make procurement greener. It is to understand how purchasing and supply management decisions can support reliable healthcare delivery, protect patients, and contribute to credible environmental improvement.
A more resilient supply chain is not automatically a lower-carbon supply chain, and a lower-carbon product is not automatically safer or more reliable. These objectives need to be evaluated separately before they can be considered together.
Why Supply Chain Resilience and Sustainability Matter
Healthcare organizations depend on medicines, medical devices, diagnostic products, clinical consumables, equipment, and supporting services. Their availability and suitability are essential to many clinical activities.
When a critical product becomes unavailable, the consequences may extend beyond the purchasing department. A clinical service may need to use an alternative product, modify its procedures, or adjust its capacity. The seriousness of the disruption depends on the product's clinical function, available alternatives, and the time required to restore an appropriate supply.
Climate-related events can expose weaknesses in these arrangements, but they are not the only cause of disruption. Manufacturing problems, product recalls, market shortages, regulatory developments, and concentrated production can create similar difficulties.
Climate resilience therefore involves understanding where supply arrangements are vulnerable and how clinically necessary products can remain available under changing conditions.
Environmental sustainability introduces a different, although related, concern. Healthcare goods and services generate greenhouse gas emissions through activities such as raw material extraction, manufacturing, distribution, use, and disposal. These impacts are often spread across several organizations and countries, making them less visible to the healthcare facilities purchasing the products.
The World Health Organization's Decarbonizing the Healthcare Supply Chain: Strategic Actions for Health Systems, published on December 4, 2025, identifies supply chains as a major source of healthcare-related greenhouse gas emissions. WHO cites global estimates suggesting that approximately 60–80% of emissions associated with healthcare arise from goods and services supplied to health systems.
This is an international estimate, not a verified measurement for healthcare organizations in Viet Nam. Actual contributions depend on the structure of the health system, purchasing patterns, clinical services, energy sources, and methods used to measure emissions.
The WHO report highlights opportunities to reduce emissions through changes in how healthcare goods and services are selected, purchased, and used. It also recognizes that these approaches must reflect the priorities, capabilities, and resources of individual health systems.
For Viet Nam, this creates an opportunity to consider supply reliability and environmental performance together, without assuming that improvement in one area automatically produces improvement in the other.
Starting With Clinical Needs Rather Than Product Claims
The most useful starting point for healthcare procurement is understanding what the organization needs to provide safe and appropriate care.
Not every purchased product has the same implications for patient safety. A temporary shortage of some administrative materials may cause inconvenience, while the unavailability of a product required for a time-sensitive clinical procedure could interrupt treatment.
The importance of a product depends on its function, how it is used, the consequences of interruption, and whether an appropriate alternative can be obtained and used safely.
Consider a hospital using medical equipment that requires specific compatible consumables. The equipment may remain fully operational, but the associated clinical service can become difficult to provide if those consumables are unavailable. Purchasing staff may recognize the shortage, while clinicians and biomedical engineers understand why a seemingly similar substitute may not be suitable.
This is why procurement decisions benefit from input from several professional groups. Procurement, pharmacy, clinical teams, laboratories, infection prevention, biomedical engineering, and quality management may each hold information needed to understand the consequences of changing products or suppliers.
The objective is not to establish a universal list of products that every hospital must classify as critical. A product essential to one organization may have little relevance to another because their services, equipment, and patient populations differ.
A useful distinction is between products for which routine purchasing arrangements provide adequate assurance and those where a shortage could create significant clinical consequences.
Once these needs are understood, organizations are better positioned to examine product alternatives, supplier reliability, and environmental characteristics without allowing marketing claims to determine clinical priorities.
Understanding Supplier Reliability Beyond Delivery Performance
A supplier's delivery history provides useful information, but it does not tell the whole story about supply reliability.
A distributor may have delivered products consistently for years while depending on a single manufacturer. Another supplier may offer several brands that share the same production facilities or essential components. In both cases, the apparent number of supply options may overstate the actual degree of independence.
Healthcare organizations may not have complete visibility into these arrangements. Nevertheless, where appropriate and consistent with applicable procurement requirements, they can seek information relevant to understanding significant dependencies.
Such information may concern product availability, traceability, quality management arrangements, delivery reliability, manufacturer relationships, and procedures for communicating shortages, recalls, or other significant changes.
Supplier performance also needs to be understood over time. A satisfactory tender result or purchasing agreement does not guarantee that every subsequent delivery will meet clinical needs. Recurring shortages, incomplete deliveries, product complaints, or unresolved quality concerns may indicate problems requiring attention.
At the same time, supplier performance should be assessed fairly. An isolated disruption caused by exceptional circumstances may require a different response from repeated failure to meet agreed obligations.
For healthcare organizations, the practical concern is whether significant supply problems can be recognized early enough to support appropriate action before patient care is affected. This becomes particularly important when a product has few clinically suitable alternatives or requires a long period to replace.
Strengthening Supply Reliability Without Creating Additional Waste
Diversifying suppliers and increasing inventory are often proposed as ways to reduce vulnerability to shortages. Both may be useful, but neither is automatically the best solution.
Using more than one supplier can reduce dependence on a single source when the suppliers offer genuinely independent and suitable alternatives. However, different distributors may rely on the same manufacturer, while alternative brands may depend on shared components or production arrangements.
Diversification can also introduce requirements for product assessment, staff training, documentation, equipment compatibility, or technical support. The number of suppliers alone is therefore not a sufficient measure of resilience.
Inventory decisions involve similar trade-offs. Maintaining additional stock may provide protection against certain disruptions, particularly when replacement products are difficult to obtain. Yet excessive inventory can increase storage costs, expiry risks, financial pressure, and waste.
Conversely, reducing inventory to improve efficiency may create shortages if demand changes unexpectedly or replacement products cannot be delivered within the required timeframe.
There is no universally appropriate stock level for every medical product. Decisions depend on clinical importance, product characteristics, demand patterns, available alternatives, procurement arrangements, and the organization's capacity to maintain product quality.
Environmental consequences also need consideration. Additional inventory, alternative suppliers, and changes in distribution may affect resource use, packaging, transportation, storage, and disposal. The direction and scale of these impacts cannot be assumed without suitable evidence.
A resilient supply chain is therefore not necessarily one with more suppliers or larger inventories. It is one that can meet clinical needs reliably while limiting avoidable costs, waste, and environmental burdens.
Product Substitution Must Be Clinically Appropriate
When an established medical product becomes unavailable, identifying a substitute may help maintain clinical services. It may also create an opportunity to consider alternatives with better environmental performance.
However, substitution requires careful professional assessment.
Two products may appear similar in a catalog but differ in intended use, technical characteristics, clinical performance, compatibility, handling requirements, or the training necessary for safe use.
A replacement medical device may require different consumables or maintenance arrangements. A different clinical material may affect an established procedure or infection prevention practice. Even when purchasing descriptions appear similar, products may not be interchangeable for a particular clinical application.
For medicines, therapeutic alternatives and substitutions must comply with relevant pharmaceutical requirements and remain within the responsibilities of appropriately authorized healthcare professionals.
For medical devices and other clinical products, organizations need to consider applicable regulatory requirements, intended use, technical specifications, compatibility, safety information, and evidence of performance.
Environmental characteristics become relevant to the comparison only when the alternatives can meet the necessary clinical, technical, and regulatory requirements.
Even when a substitute is acceptable, implementation may require preparation. Staff may need training, procedures may need adjustment, or compatibility with existing systems may need confirmation.
A product promoted as using less material or generating fewer emissions may deserve consideration, but such claims cannot justify compromising patient safety, product quality, infection prevention, or authorized clinical practice.
The goal is not to discourage innovation or environmentally preferable alternatives. It is to ensure that changes intended to improve sustainability do not introduce avoidable clinical risks.
What Does a Lower-Carbon Healthcare Product Actually Mean?
The term lower-carbon is increasingly used in discussions about sustainable healthcare procurement. However, it is a comparative claim that requires an appropriate method and supporting evidence.
A product cannot automatically be considered lower-carbon because it uses less packaging, weighs less, is manufactured locally, or is described as environmentally friendly.
These characteristics may influence emissions, but their significance depends on the product and the activities included in the assessment.
A product's carbon footprint may include emissions associated with raw materials, manufacturing, packaging, distribution, use, maintenance or reprocessing where relevant, and end-of-life treatment.
The stages included depend on the purpose and scope of the assessment. A study covering only raw materials and manufacturing may reach a different conclusion from one examining the product's entire life cycle.
Both approaches can provide useful information, but their results are not necessarily directly comparable.
ISO 14040:2006 and ISO 14044:2006, as amended, provide internationally recognized principles and requirements for life-cycle assessment. ISO 14067:2018 establishes requirements and guidance for quantifying and reporting the carbon footprint of products, consistent with life-cycle assessment principles.
Viet Nam has also adopted TCVN ISO 14067:2020, Greenhouse Gases — Carbon Footprint of Products — Requirements and Guidelines for Quantification, which corresponds to ISO 14067:2018.
The GHG Protocol's Product Life Cycle Accounting and Reporting Standard provides another internationally recognized framework for understanding greenhouse gas emissions associated with products.
These standards help explain why measurement boundaries, assumptions, data quality, and the unit of comparison matter.
Comparing emissions per individual product may be misleading if one product is used several times and another is intended for single use. A meaningful assessment may need to consider an equivalent clinical or functional service rather than simply comparing individual items.
Reusable products illustrate this complexity. They may reduce some manufacturing and disposal impacts associated with repeated purchasing of single-use products. However, their environmental performance also depends on product lifespan, the number of uses achieved, cleaning or reprocessing requirements, water and energy consumption, and end-of-life treatment.
These considerations do not mean reusable products are always environmentally preferable. Nor do they establish that single-use products are always safer.
Clinical suitability, infection prevention, manufacturer instructions, applicable regulations, and reliable environmental evidence remain essential.
It is also important to recognize that a carbon footprint addresses greenhouse gas emissions, not every environmental impact. Water consumption, resource depletion, waste, and other environmental consequences may require separate assessment.
A product with a lower measured carbon footprint is therefore not automatically environmentally preferable in every respect.
Distinguishing Product Carbon Data From Supplier Sustainability Claims
Healthcare suppliers may provide environmental information through product declarations, sustainability reports, environmental labels, certifications, or statements about emissions reductions.
Some of these materials may be useful, but they answer different questions.
A company's sustainability report may describe its organizational emissions, energy use, or long-term reduction targets. It does not necessarily provide evidence that a particular product has lower emissions than a clinically comparable alternative.
Similarly, a supplier's commitment to achieve net-zero emissions in the future does not demonstrate that the products supplied today already have a lower carbon footprint.
Organizations should therefore examine what an environmental claim actually covers. Does it relate to the specific product or to the manufacturer's operations as a whole? Does it cover production only or a broader life cycle? Are the assumptions and methodology explained? Is the comparison based on equivalent functions and sufficiently comparable data?
Independent verification or credible third-party review may improve confidence where relevant and available. However, a certification or environmental label must still be understood according to its purpose and scope.
For example, certification of an environmental management system does not automatically establish that an individual product has a lower carbon footprint than an alternative. An environmental label may confirm particular environmental characteristics without providing a comparative product carbon assessment.
Carbon offsetting introduces another distinction.
ISO 14067:2018 addresses the quantification and reporting of product carbon footprints. Carbon offsetting and the communication of product carbon footprint claims are outside the standard's scope.
Consequently, emissions associated with a product should not be confused with claims that those emissions have been compensated through activities elsewhere.
Where reliable comparative information is unavailable, healthcare organizations should avoid describing a product as demonstrably lower-carbon.
They may still examine credible information about materials, packaging, product lifespan, resource use, or other relevant characteristics, provided the conclusions remain consistent with the available evidence.
Incomplete information does not prevent professional learning. It does, however, limit the strength of environmental claims that can responsibly be made.
Sustainable Procurement Is More Than Choosing a Green Product
WHO's 2025 supply chain guidance emphasizes that procurement can influence the environmental performance of healthcare goods and services.
Purchasing decisions affect which products are used, what information suppliers are encouraged to provide, and how health systems communicate their expectations to manufacturers and service providers.
However, sustainable procurement is broader than selecting products with attractive environmental labels.
It involves considering the organization's needs, clinical suitability, product quality, costs over the relevant period, supply reliability, and credible environmental and social considerations.
ISO 20400:2017, Sustainable Procurement — Guidance, provides an internationally recognized framework for integrating sustainability into procurement activities.
Viet Nam has adopted TCVN 12874:2020, Sustainable Procurement — Guidance, which is technically identical to ISO 20400:2017.
These standards offer useful management principles for organizations seeking to incorporate sustainability into purchasing decisions. They are guidance standards rather than requirements for obtaining a separate sustainable procurement certification.
Their application does not replace legal obligations governing purchasing or contractor selection.
Sustainability may inform an organization's procurement planning without necessarily becoming a formal evaluation criterion in every purchasing activity. For example, a healthcare organization may review opportunities to reduce unnecessary purchasing, improve product information, or understand the environmental impacts of selected product categories.
Whether a particular environmental condition can be incorporated into tender requirements, eligibility criteria, evaluation methods, or contractual obligations is a separate question governed by the applicable procurement framework.
For publicly regulated procurement, this distinction is particularly important.
Green Procurement Already Has a Legal Basis in Viet Nam
Green procurement is not merely an international concept that Vietnamese healthcare organizations may wish to explore in the future. It already has a place within Viet Nam's legal framework.
Article 146 of the Law on Environmental Protection, Law No. 72/2020/QH14, addresses green procurement. It defines green procurement in relation to environmentally friendly products and services certified with the Viet Nam Ecolabel or otherwise recognized under applicable law.
The provision also establishes a policy preference for green procurement in investment projects and activities using state budget funds, subject to government regulations.
The Law on Bidding, Law No. 22/2023/QH15, as amended, provides additional mechanisms concerning procurement preferences and sustainable bidding.
These mechanisms include provisions for eligible environmentally friendly products and services, together with approaches that may allow relevant sustainability considerations to be reflected in procurement requirements or evaluation methods when the legal conditions are satisfied.
Government Decree No. 214/2025/ND-CP provides further implementation requirements, including provisions related to sustainable bidding and preferences for products and services meeting applicable environmental or energy labeling conditions. Its current application must be considered together with subsequent amendments, including Decree No. 349/2026/ND-CP.
These mechanisms demonstrate that sustainability considerations can have a legitimate role in public procurement.
However, they do not give purchasing organizations unrestricted discretion to favor any product marketed as green.
A supplier's lower-carbon claim, a product's eligibility for environmental procurement preferences, and its clinical suitability are three separate matters.
A product described as lower-carbon is not automatically entitled to procurement preferences under Vietnamese law. Eligibility depends on applicable definitions, recognized certifications or other qualifying evidence, and the relevant implementing provisions.
Equally, a product qualifying for an environmental preference must still meet mandatory technical, quality, safety, and other requirements governing the procurement.
Healthcare organizations must also ensure that procurement conditions do not unlawfully restrict competition or create unjustified advantages for particular suppliers.
The legal basis for environmental considerations is therefore real, but its application requires careful interpretation.
For CHVN, explaining this distinction is valuable because healthcare leaders need to understand both the opportunities and the limits of sustainable procurement. Clinical requirements, environmental evidence, and procurement law must be considered together.
Public Healthcare Procurement: Applying the Current Legal Framework
Procurement requirements in Viet Nam differ according to the healthcare organization, funding source, product category, level of financial autonomy, and purchasing arrangement.
The Law on Bidding, Law No. 22/2023/QH15, has been amended by subsequent legislation. The relevant consolidated text is reflected in Consolidated Document No. 74/VBHN-VPQH, dated March 25, 2026.
Government Decree No. 214/2025/ND-CP establishes detailed provisions and measures for contractor selection. It has been amended by subsequent decrees, including Decree No. 349/2026/ND-CP, effective September 9, 2026.
The updated provisions are reflected in Consolidated Document No. 36/2026/VBHN-NĐ-BTC, dated September 23, 2026.
These instruments provide the general framework for procurement activities falling within their scope. They must be considered alongside relevant healthcare regulations and the circumstances of the individual purchasing organization.
For pharmaceutical procurement at public healthcare facilities, Ministry of Health Circular 40/2025/TT-BYT, effective October 25, 2025, provides specific rules concerning medicine procurement within its defined scope.
For selected medical devices and laboratory testing supplies, Circular 01/2026/TT-BYT establishes a national centralized procurement list. The Circular took effect on March 1, 2026, while procurement under the list is scheduled to begin on January 1, 2027.
These developments have implications for procurement planning, but they should not be interpreted as requiring every medical product to be purchased centrally or as giving universal preference to products claiming lower emissions.
Public healthcare organizations also differ in their autonomy and funding arrangements. Applicable requirements should therefore be determined according to the relevant legal provisions rather than assumed from an organization's public or private status alone.
Where sustainable procurement considerations are legally permitted, organizations may examine how to integrate them transparently and appropriately.
The assessment must remain consistent with mandatory product requirements, applicable evaluation methods, recognized eligibility conditions, and fair competition.
For CHVN, the purpose of explaining these developments is to support informed professional understanding. It is not to provide instructions for designing a specific tender, determining a bidder's entitlement to preferences, or selecting a winning supplier.
Those decisions require examination of the applicable legal instruments and the circumstances of the procurement concerned.
Reducing Avoidable Purchasing Without Restricting Necessary Care
An important opportunity for improving sustainability lies in using healthcare products more efficiently.
Unnecessary duplication, avoidable expiry, poorly coordinated ordering, and purchasing quantities that do not reflect actual service needs may contribute to both financial waste and environmental impacts.
Healthcare organizations can examine these issues through existing pharmacy, clinical, procurement, and supply management activities.
Repeated expiry of a particular consumable, for example, may indicate a need to review demand forecasts, ordering frequency, product selection, or coordination between departments.
However, an unused product is not necessarily evidence of unnecessary purchasing.
Some products are maintained because they are needed for emergencies or unexpected clinical demand. A reasonable level of preparedness may require resources that are not routinely used.
Reducing inventory solely to improve environmental indicators could create a risk of shortages if the clinical purpose of the stock is not understood.
The same principle applies to product reuse and substitution. Sustainability objectives should not encourage practices that conflict with infection prevention, manufacturer instructions, product regulations, or professional requirements.
Improving resource efficiency means reducing avoidable consumption while preserving the products and capabilities needed for safe care. It does not mean minimizing purchases regardless of clinical consequences.
Looking Beyond Purchase Price
The lowest initial purchase price does not always represent the lowest total cost of using a healthcare product.
Depending on the product, relevant costs may include maintenance, compatible consumables, staff training, technical support, storage, reprocessing, energy consumption, waste management, and eventual replacement or disposal.
A product with a higher initial purchase price may offer advantages in some of these areas. Conversely, a less expensive alternative may require additional resources during its operating life.
Environmental performance adds another consideration, but it should not be assumed to follow either purchase price or total financial cost.
Life-cycle costing and life-cycle environmental assessment answer related but different questions.
Life-cycle costing examines financial consequences associated with obtaining and using a product or service. Life-cycle environmental assessment examines specified environmental impacts across defined stages of the product or service life cycle.
Both can inform procurement planning where relevant information is available.
However, the use of particular costing methods, environmental factors, or evaluated-price formulas in a formal tender must be consistent with applicable procurement law.
Viet Nam's Law on Bidding recognizes the evaluated-price method and provides mechanisms for incorporating eligible sustainability considerations under the relevant conditions.
This creates opportunities for more comprehensive evaluation in suitable procurements, but it does not mean every environmental impact can automatically be converted into a price adjustment or tender preference.
The criteria and methods used must be lawful, relevant, transparent, and supported by information appropriate to the procurement.
Beginning With Information Healthcare Organizations Can Obtain
Many healthcare organizations in Viet Nam may not yet have complete product-level greenhouse gas emissions data for the goods and services they purchase.
Manufacturers and distributors may also differ considerably in their ability to provide this information, particularly where production involves multiple organizations and international supply chains.
The lack of comprehensive data should not prevent organizations from beginning to understand their purchasing activities.
A practical approach may involve examining selected product categories where clinical importance, procurement expenditure, supply concentration, or potential environmental impacts justify closer attention.
Some products may have credible environmental assessments or product-specific information. Others may have only partial data, such as packaging characteristics, materials, manufacturing information, or supplier-level emissions reporting.
These sources can inform preliminary discussions, but they should not be treated as equivalent evidence.
Expenditure-based emissions estimates, for example, may help identify broad purchasing categories that warrant further investigation. They cannot, by themselves, establish that one individual product has a lower carbon footprint than another clinically comparable product.
WHO's Measuring Greenhouse Gas Emissions in Health Systems, published on December 22, 2025, emphasizes consistent measurement approaches, transparent boundaries, and developing the institutional capabilities necessary to track emissions over time.
For organizations beginning this work, understanding the quality and limitations of available information may be more valuable than attempting to produce a precise-looking carbon footprint from incomplete data.
Appropriate supplier engagement can support this learning. However, communication with suppliers should remain consistent with applicable procurement requirements, confidentiality obligations, competition rules, and conflict-of-interest safeguards.
The purpose is not to favor particular manufacturers or distributors. It is to improve the quality of information available for future product and purchasing decisions.
Reporting Progress Without Overstating the Evidence
Supply reliability and environmental improvement require different forms of evidence.
An organization may monitor delivery performance, product availability, shortages, or the effectiveness of approved alternatives to understand supply reliability.
Environmental improvement may require information about emissions, purchasing quantities, product life cycles, resource use, or other relevant impacts.
Progress in one area should not automatically be presented as progress in the other.
A supplier may improve delivery performance without reducing emissions. A product may have a lower measured carbon footprint but require further assessment of its availability or clinical suitability.
Organizations should therefore avoid combining unrelated indicators into a single sustainability or resilience score without a defensible methodology.
WHO's Indicators of Climate Resilience and GHG Emissions in Health Systems, published in March 2026, provides a broader framework for measurement and learning. However, it should not be interpreted as a mandatory hospital procurement scorecard or a certification scheme established by CHVN.
Where environmental progress is reported, the information should explain what was measured, the relevant period, the assessment boundaries, and important uncertainties.
A change in clinical activity, service mix, purchasing volume, or product availability can affect emissions results. These factors need to be considered before claiming that a particular purchasing intervention reduced emissions.
Responsible reporting does not require complete certainty. It requires clarity about what the evidence supports and what remains unknown.
What This Means for Healthcare Organizations in Viet Nam
Climate-resilient supply chains and lower-carbon procurement are increasingly relevant to healthcare systems, but their development in Viet Nam must reflect the realities of healthcare delivery and procurement.
Organizations differ considerably in size, services, resources, and purchasing capabilities.
A large hospital may have specialized procurement, pharmacy, biomedical engineering, and quality management teams capable of examining selected product categories in detail. A smaller healthcare facility may depend on fewer suppliers and have limited access to environmental data or technical expertise.
Their approaches should not be identical.
Some organizations may begin by understanding which supply dependencies could affect important clinical services. Others may be ready to examine product alternatives, improve purchasing forecasts, request more credible environmental information, or consider sustainability within future procurement planning.
Where the legal framework permits specific green procurement preferences or sustainable evaluation methods, organizations can examine their application with appropriate procurement and legal expertise.
Where such methods are not suitable or legally available for a particular purchasing activity, sustainability-related learning can still contribute to planning, product understanding, and responsible resource management through permitted arrangements.
For Climate & Health Vietnam, this is a relevant area for evidence synthesis, professional education, and collaboration.
Bringing together healthcare quality, clinical practice, procurement, pharmacy, biomedical engineering, and environmental sustainability perspectives can help professionals understand the trade-offs involved in purchasing decisions.
CHVN's role is not to endorse particular products, determine tender outcomes, or certify low-carbon healthcare supply chains. It is to make credible evidence more accessible and support informed discussion about how healthcare organizations can pursue resilience and environmental improvement responsibly.
Balancing Reliability, Patient Safety, and Lower-Carbon Procurement
Healthcare organizations should not assume that the most resilient supply arrangement will also have the lowest greenhouse gas emissions. Nor should they assume that a product with a lower reported carbon footprint will be clinically suitable, consistently available, or less costly to use.
These outcomes must be assessed separately before they can be considered together.
A practical starting point is to understand what clinical services require, where significant supply dependencies exist, and which alternative purchasing or product-use arrangements are supported by reliable information.
Once clinical and technical requirements are established, organizations can consider whether changes offer improvements in supply reliability, environmental performance, or both.
Some opportunities may be straightforward, such as reducing avoidable expiry, improving demand forecasting, or obtaining clearer supplier information. Others may require more detailed product evaluation, additional technical expertise, or longer-term procurement planning.
Not every intervention will achieve all objectives simultaneously. Recognizing these trade-offs is part of responsible healthcare management.
A more sustainable healthcare supply chain is not simply one that purchases fewer products or favors those carrying environmental claims. It is one that makes informed use of resources while protecting the availability, quality, and clinical suitability of the goods and services needed for care.
For healthcare organizations in Viet Nam, credible progress toward climate-resilient and lower-carbon procurement depends on combining reliable supply, patient safety, appropriate product quality, transparent environmental evidence, and lawful purchasing decisions.
Selected References and Policy Context
International guidance
World Health Organization. Decarbonizing the Healthcare Supply Chain: Strategic Actions for Health Systems. December 4, 2025.
World Health Organization. Measuring Greenhouse Gas Emissions in Health Systems. December 22, 2025.
World Health Organization. Operational Framework for Building Climate Resilient and Low Carbon Health Systems. 2023.
World Health Organization. Indicators of Climate Resilience and GHG Emissions in Health Systems. March 11, 2026.
International Organization for Standardization. ISO 20400:2017 — Sustainable Procurement — Guidance.
International Organization for Standardization. ISO 14040:2006 — Environmental Management — Life Cycle Assessment — Principles and Framework, as amended.
International Organization for Standardization. ISO 14044:2006 — Environmental Management — Life Cycle Assessment — Requirements and Guidelines, as amended.
International Organization for Standardization. ISO 14067:2018 — Greenhouse Gases — Carbon Footprint of Products — Requirements and Guidelines for Quantification.
Greenhouse Gas Protocol. Product Life Cycle Accounting and Reporting Standard.
Viet Nam standards and regulatory context
Ministry of Science and Technology. TCVN 12874:2020 — Sustainable Procurement — Guidance, technically identical to ISO 20400:2017.
Ministry of Science and Technology. TCVN ISO 14067:2020 — Greenhouse Gases — Carbon Footprint of Products — Requirements and Guidelines for Quantification, corresponding to ISO 14067:2018.
National Assembly. Law on Environmental Protection No. 72/2020/QH14, as amended, particularly Article 146 concerning green procurement.
National Assembly. Law on Bidding No. 22/2023/QH15, as amended and reflected in Consolidated Document No. 74/VBHN-VPQH, dated March 25, 2026.
Government of Viet Nam. Decree No. 214/2025/ND-CP, dated August 4, 2025, detailing provisions and measures for contractor selection under the Law on Bidding, as subsequently amended.
Government of Viet Nam. Decree No. 349/2026/ND-CP, dated September 9, 2026, amending provisions concerning contractor selection, effective September 9, 2026.
Ministry of Finance. Consolidated Document No. 36/2026/VBHN-NĐ-BTC, dated September 23, 2026, concerning detailed provisions and measures for implementing the Law on Bidding regarding contractor selection.
Ministry of Health. Circular 40/2025/TT-BYT, dated October 25, 2025, concerning pharmaceutical procurement at public healthcare facilities.
Ministry of Health. Circular 01/2026/TT-BYT, dated January 9, 2026, establishing the national centralized procurement list for selected medical devices and laboratory testing supplies, effective March 1, 2026, with procurement under the list scheduled to begin January 1, 2027.
Professional scope: This article is intended for professional education, evidence synthesis, and knowledge sharing. It does not constitute legal advice, instructions for preparing or evaluating a specific tender, supplier or product endorsement, product conformity assessment, an independently verified life-cycle or carbon footprint assessment, regulatory approval, or accreditation or certification criteria. References to WHO, ISO, and other international standards or publications do not imply endorsement of Climate & Health Vietnam by those organizations. Healthcare organizations should apply relevant Vietnamese procurement and product regulations, applicable clinical and technical requirements, and qualified professional judgment when evaluating supplier reliability, product suitability, environmental claims, and purchasing decisions.