In Vietnam, each primary care community health center (CHC) consists of a multi-professional team with six disciplines, including a physician, assistant physician, nurse, pharmacist, midwife, and Vietnamese traditional physician, who are able to meet the majority of patient's needs at the primary care level. How they collaborate, especially in chronic disease management (CDM), is still limited described in the literature. This study aims to gain insight into the perceptions and the experiences of primary health care providers (PHCPs) toward interprofessional collaboration (IPC) in CDM in CHCs in (Hue) Vietnam. A qualitative study of descriptive phenomenology was performed using two focus groups and 15 semi-structured interviews with PHCPs from six professions relevant to CDM in CHCs. The data were analyzed using NVivo 12.0 with a thematic analysis method by a multiprofessional research team. From the analysis, the data were classified into three main themes: "lack of collaborative practice," "knowledge," and "facilitators and barriers to IPC." This study provided evidence of the awareness that actual collaboration in daily care is fragmentarily organized and that PHCPs try to finish their tasks within their profession. PHCPs work multiprofessionally and lack shared decision-making in patient-centered care. There is a need to develop an interprofessional education program and training to address these deficiencies in the Vietnamese context to improve interprofessional collaboration in health care.
Keywords: Chronic disease; Collaboration; Interprofessional collaboration; Primary healthcare; Qualitative descriptive research.