8.  Programme for solutions to social and cultural issues

To solve employment problems and develop comprehensively activities in culture, information, sports and physical culture, health, population and family planning, and other social aspects with a view to raising the quality of the nation's material, intellectual and physical life, and meeting the needs of the development of human resources and integration into the international community.

To combine harmoniously economic growth with the exercise of social equity and progress in order to generate a vigorous change in the settlement of the pressing social problems, and push back negative practices, injustices and social evils.

To quickly deploy a national programme for employment and create conditions for all working people to generate jobs or find their own. To provide each year employment for 1.3-1.4 million working people. In the course of this implementation, to create additional opportunities for working people to create and find jobs on their own so as to further increase the annual employment rate. To reduce urban unemployment rates to below 5% and to increase the employment time to 75% of the available labour time in rural areas.

To organise and control the enforcement of the Labour Code, to increase protection for the working people, especially at enterprises. To continue improving the system of salaries and wages, closely linking them with productivity, quality and efficiency, thus becoming the main income and motive of working people.

To expand social insurance for the working people of all economic sectors and to force it on agencies and enterprises. To properly organise the management and utilisation of insurance funds; to ensure the living standard of pensioners. To expand charity funds and activities of die people.

To develop and raise the quality of cultural and art activities and of the mass media and the recreational facilities to meet the cultural and intellectual needs of the people. To pay attention to these activities in mountainous, border, island and rural areas which are experiencing difficulties.

To quickly increase the volume of cultural, literary, art and press products of good ideological content and high artistic value. To increase investment in transforming and building the system of cultural and information facilities from the central to grassroots levels, and reorganise them along the line of multi-function operation and linking cultural activities with tourism, sports and recreation. To accelerate the pace of construction of national cultural projects in Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City and other large centres of the country.

To step by step modernise the radio, television, film, printing and publishing services. To improve the quality of radio and television programming and increase the capacity of radio and television transmission, including for overseas service. By the year 2000, to strive to increase to 80% the number of households watching Vietnam Television programme; and 95% the number of households listening to Radio Voice of Vietnam. To continue implementing the three national programmes on culture and information: preservation and upgrading of national historical relics and cultural heritage; development of the Vietnamese film industry; and building grassroots culture life, paying special attention to the building of cultured families, cultured villages and urban civilisation. To expand cultural, art and sport exchanges with other nations, especially those in the region. To strengthen methods and measures to coordinate forces of the whole society to formulate a healthy cultural environment and struggle persistently and vigorously to check and eliminate noxious cultural products and social evils.

To renew the managerial mechanism along the line of socialisation of cultural and information activities and, at the same time, to continue building and complementing the regimes and policies to make them suitable to the characteristics of the sector (such as price-subsidisation, order placement, capital, tariffs on cultural products; contributions to cultural services, policies to attract capital from inside and outside the country, etc.) with a view to ensuring that the cultural and information services develop quickly in renewal while retaining their socialist orientation in building an advanced culture deeply imbued with national identity. To adopt policies to care for the material and intellectual life of the corps of cultural and art workers.

To improve the basic indices on health for all, and step by step increase the physical well-being of the people, first of all, the mother and the child.

To generate quick changes in the implementation of the population strategy in scale, structure and distribution, focusing firstly on the target of no more than two children for each couple who are to raise and educate them well; to quickly reduce the percentage of women giving birth to the third child or more. Apart from additions in budget allocations and technological facilities, to increase education through communication, amend policies to restrain birth rate and consolidate the system for population and family planning management at all levels and extend it to every village and urban ward. To reduce the population growth rate to below 1.8% by the year 2000.

To implement the national nutrition programme, reducing the percentage of child malnutrition among those under-five from 42% at present to less than 30% by the year 2000 and putting an end to serious malnutrition, reducing to below 10% the percentage of population fed with less than 2,100 calorie/day, providing good care for expecting women, reducing the maternal mortality rate to 0.5%o, the mortality rate of the under-one to less than 30%o and of the under-five to less than 55%o.

To drastically reduce the morbidity and mortality rates caused by virus and parasite diseases such as malaria, tuberculosis, diarrhoea and pneumonia among children. To expand work to combat goitre, effecting the practice of every people consuming iodized salt. To eradicate polio, leprosy and tetanus among infants, quickly neutralise hot beds of epidemics, and prevent rabies. To combat drug addiction and prostitution; and to check the spread of HIV/AIDS and to treat HIV/AIDS carriers.

To develop State and private health consultation and treatment and primary health care offered. To try on experimental basis forms of joint venture between State and foreign health services in both medicine and pharmacy. To develop traditional medicine and combine it with modem medicine. To streamline the management of the pharmaceutical service, renewing its technological facilities, diversifying medicinal provision and improving the quality of products put out by producers and suppliers of medicine and medical instruments.

To increase budget allocation and mobilise capital from many other sources to invest in construction and upgrading of health-care establishments. By the year 2000, to ensure that all communes in the country will have had health stations, with 40% of them having doctors and all of them having physicians in gynaecology and obstetrics or mid-wives; all villages to have nurses; all districts to have health centres capable of handling the duty of the first life-support line. The health centres of all provinces to have adequate supply of essential facilities of all wards to help them perform the duty of the second life-support line. To continue building two intensive health centres in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City.

To improve the regime and policies on rewards for health workers, especially those working at the grassroots level and in mountainous areas. To diversify health insurance modes. To eradicate discrimination between health treatment on insurance on the one hand, and that for service fee, on the other. To adopt a hospital-fee policy favouring the poor and people living in remote areas.

To significantly reduce the number of slums in urban areas. Most of rural housing to be built on a permanent basis and equipped with lavatories, Good attention is to be paid to the Mekong Delta.

To create a new step of progress in the sports and physical culture movement, to ensure that 8-10% of the population are engaged in sports and physical culture and 50% of the schools of all grades providing regular physical culture, to formulate a system for training athletic talent for the nation and improve its sports records. To work out plans and initiate development investment in sports facilities at schools and in residential areas. To build national sports centres. And to strengthen the training of sports personnel and research workers for the sports and physical culture service.

To popularise compassion activities in society, providing better care for people with meritorious service to the nation, families of fallen fighters, war invalids, people with difficulties in life, disable people, helpless old people and children in especially difficult circumstances.