Duc Pham

Medical ethics play a fundamental role in global healthcare, ensuring that patients receive care marked by dignity, compassion and fairness. Vietnam’s 12 ethical principles, codified in 1996, integrate universal ethical standards with local sociocultural and ideological traditions, particularly emphasising emotional sacrifice, holistic care and social responsibility. While these principles promote professional excellence and community service, this essay argues that their application within Vietnam’s under-resourced healthcare system has unintended consequences for physician well-being. An analysis of key domains—including emotional burden from holistic care expectations, administrative and educational overload, emergency care pressures and end-of-life responsibilities—reveals how systemic shortcomings intensify professional strain. Evidence from Vietnam and international comparisons shows that without structured delegation of non-clinical duties, protected working conditions and integrated palliative care systems, physicians face escalating risks of emotional exhaustion, moral injury and career attrition. Unlike healthcare models in developed countries, where ethical standards are balanced by institutional safeguards, Vietnam’s framework demands near-unlimited commitment without corresponding systemic support. Unless ethical expectations are recalibrated and support structures are modernised, Vietnam’s medical ethics, though noble in aspiration, risk undermining the very sustainability of its healthcare workforce. This essay highlights the need for urgent reform to align Vietnam’s ethical ideals with contemporary clinical realities, ensuring that both patient-centred care and physician resilience are protected.

This three-volume set—LNAI 13031, LNAI 13032, and LNAI 13033—constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the 18th Pacific Rim Conference on Artificial Intelligence (PRICAI 2021), held in Hanoi, Vietnam, in November 2021. The 93 full papers and 28 short papers presented in these volumes were carefully reviewed and selected from 382 submissions. PRICAI covers a wide range of topics of social and economic importance for countries in the Pacific Rim, including artificial intelligence, machine learning, natural language processing, knowledge representation and reasoning, planning and scheduling, computer vision, distributed artificial intelligence, and search methodologies. Part I includes the following topical headings: AI Foundations / Decision Theory, Applications of AI, Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, Evolutionary Computation / Optimization, and Knowledge Representation and Reasoning.

This three-volume set, LNCS 14325-14327 constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the 20th Pacific Rim Conference on Artificial Intelligence, PRICAI 2023, held in Jakarta, Indonesia, in November 2023. The 95 full papers and 36 short papers presented in these volumes were carefully reviewed and selected from 422 submissions. PRICAI covers a wide range of topics in the areas of social and economic importance for countries in the Pacific Rim: artificial intelligence, machine learning, natural language processing, knowledge representation and reasoning, planning and scheduling, computer vision, distributed artificial intelligence, search methodologies, etc.