In 2016, nutrition specialist Dr. Susan Kleiner’s husband received a call from a friend looking for a dentist to join a volunteer trip to Can Tho, Vietnam. He asked Dr. Kleiner what she thought he should do. “I said, ‘Well don’t go without me!’” Since her first trip with her husband in 2017, she has made six volunteer trips to Can Tho University of Medicine and Pharmacy (CTUMP) as part of a non-profit called Medical Educational Exchange Team, or MEET, led by Dr. Robert Gertler. As Dr. Kleiner developed a deeper relationship with the university and grew her team of nutritionists, she realized the project was getting too big for MEET to handle alone. They needed an online platform to share resources, a way to organize virtual lectures, a space to save materials for learners, and more volunteers. Dr. Gertler suggested she reach out to Health Volunteers Overseas for support. MEET’s mission aligns with HVO’s – both organizations focus on educating providers, providing support and training until local health workers are able to both improve their practice and move on to training others.
“This is so exciting, this partnership, for us to have access to the technology HVO is using and the support they have given us so that our team can focus on their clinical expertise and not worry about how to build a website, make recordings, archive them, and think about how we are going to do this,” said Dr. Kleiner about collaboration with HVO. “This has been seamless and joyous.” In March and April 2025, Dr. Kleiner helped set up four lectures using HVO’s Remote Education Interface (REI), an online platform HVO developed to schedule and stream lectures, save materials, and share resources. Lectures are scheduled continuously through the rest of the year. The first three lectures averaged forty participants, but the fourth, covering food poisoning, attracted 220 health care providers and students. Four hospitals participate in the project: CTUMP Hospital, Can Tho Oncology Hospital, Can Tho Gynecology and Obstetrics Hospital (CTGOH), and An Giang Central General Hospital.
The program has grown considerably since Dr. Kleiner’s first trip in 2017. “When I was there in 2017,” she said, “what I discovered was that there were three faculty members in the school of public health at CTUMP teaching students nutrition. They were all physicians, their work in the hospital had nothing to do with nutrition, but they wanted to do more and were aware that malnutrition was a problem in their university hospital.” What Dr. Kleiner found was that the conversation around nutrition tended to center around public health, not around its role in clinical medicine. Patients who spent several weeks in the hospital following procedures were not necessarily being fed – families are generally responsible for providing patients with food, and most hospitals do not have the capacity for tube feeding post-surgery. Dr. Kleiner stated that forty percent of patients in hospitals who are considered malnourished did not enter the hospital that way. Without proper nutrition, they lack the energy to heal properly.
Dr. Kleiner also noted that much of the understanding of nutrition was in relation to malnutrition and famine. “After the war,” she said, “they rapidly developed a focus on maternal and child nutrition, but all the people doing the work were physicians and nurses. Never has there been a dietician. It’s only in the last couple of years that nutrition has become a burgeoning profession.” Health workers have been focused on lack of food – not necessarily how to maintain a healthy, balanced diet. This has become of particular concern in recent years as American fast-food chains have begun taking over the food scene.
During one of her early trips, Dr. Kleiner worked with faculty to help develop a nutrition screening program at CTUMP. “There’s a certain credibility when there’s international support,” she explained. “They gain leverage. They were able to pass a whole program we developed through the board. They really developed it, but we gave input and expressed our support for it. In short order, they had a whole screening program, someone dedicated to doing that in the hospital. That was a profound change.” Over the years, Dr. Kleiner was impressed by the speed at which they were able to achieve positive change. “We really have an impact – I see them implement changes so quickly. In 2017, we toured the kitchen at the Can Tho Gynecology and Obstetrics Hospital. It was 125 degrees in this kitchen, and the chefs worked in front of enormous, fired woks with fans blowing hot air in. We suggested it would be a good idea to turn the fans around and pull the hot air out of the kitchen. We also recommended fans on the other side of the room. By the next day, they had changed everything. At another hospital, they showed us the room where they were preparing the tube feeding formulas – putting the food in blenders. They didn’t have a place built for this, so it was in a kind of closet. There was a faucet to clean the blenders, but no hot water, and the blenders were on the floor. So we talked about simple solutions, like hot water and detergent and tables. A week later, plumbers had been in, they had installed metal tables, they had done everything. They just did it. They are so eager for information and are ready for change.”
During one of her visits, Dr. Kleiner gave a talk at CTGOH on nutrition throughout a woman’s lifetime, discussing muscle mass, bone density, and the need to increase protein intake as women age. “Six months after that lecture, when I came back, the whole intervention program in the hospital had been changed,” she said. “They had an outpatient program with education that now included whole lists of foods, diet planning, menu planning suggestions, and they had gone and done interventions and educational programming in elderly communities, all talking about increasing protein in women’s diets. I don’t have data on the outcomes, but we know how important these interventions are. When you lose muscle, you lose bone, and you lose independence. The impact is so important, and I could see how they implemented the information I shared.”
Now, what began as a group of three physicians at CTUMP doing their best to teach nutrition topics is a thriving department of eight permanent faculty members, all of whom have degrees in clinical nutrition, and ten invited lecturers. Dr. Nam Truong Thanh, HVO’s onsite coordinator for the project, completed a PhD in clinical nutrition in Thailand. Two others are in the process of receiving their PhDs in nutrition as well. The university now has a clinical dietetics curriculum, and HVO is facilitating volunteer-provided online lectures and resource sharing. Dr. Kleiner believes this online presence is important: “Making sure this information doesn’t just go into the ether and disappear, but instead recording and archiving it is so important, in my opinion, because not everyone can join every webinar live.” She pointed out that keeping this information available on HVO’s REI allows learners to more easily take and share information with other members of their team.
Dr. Kleiner is excited to continue her work with the project: “This is the most consequential work I’ve ever done when it comes to public health. Seeing the advancement of care for people who otherwise wouldn’t have the resources…it’s a very profound time in my life. We are reaching the health care community in Can Tho and beyond. I love it. The idea that we can become part of HVO is amazing. All our speakers are HVO members. We can tell volunteers, ‘These are the topics the community in Vietnam is asking for. Who has the expertise?’ I can’t believe all that has transpired, and I’m humbled by the access and opportunity that we have working with HVO. It has been extraordinary.”
Onsite coordinator Dr. Nam shared his perspective on the new partnership with HVO:
“Through this teaching exchange series, we hope to share both academic knowledge and practical experiences with health care professionals, postgraduate trainees, medical students, and the broader nutrition community. Our goal is to support the application of nutrition care in both clinical and community settings. This initiative also serves as a valuable opportunity for our faculty members to strengthen their capacity to teach professional content in English. Additionally, we see this series as a platform to expand and deepen our network of scientists and health care professionals – particularly those working in nutrition education and nutrition care – who share a common interest in improving public health. Based on the experience gained from these activities, we aim to develop and organize annual online training courses and webinars that address the learning needs of those interested in nutrition-related topics.”
To get learn more about volunteer opportunities, contact HVO Program Manager Lauren Franklin at l.franklin@hvousa.org.