Wan Fang Municipal Hospital (
"We did everything in accordance with the law and the contract we had signed with the city government," said Chang Yu-yen (張幼燕), director of the hospital's Physical Examination Center (健檢中心).
The Labor Safety and Health Law (勞工安全衛生法) specifies that the government has the obligation to authorize hospitals to conduct annual medical checkups for government workers, and that commissioned hospitals are obliged to keep the test results confidential.
"Since the Taipei City Government entrusted us with the check-up project, it was definitely entitled to know the results," she said.
But when asked about the individual privacy of the two persons involved, Chang said that they are obliged to protect the privacy of the authorized party, and the authorized party in this case is the Taipei City Government.
"What went awry here is that the city government shouldn't have taken advantage of the confidential record and asked the two to take prolonged sick leave before they were eventually discharged," Chang said.
Troy Lee (
"But it takes two to tango. The hospital and the city government had to cooperate with each other to violate the basic human rights of the employees," he said.
Taipei City Councilor Lee Ching-yuan (
Lee found that the two men were first ordered to take a long sick leave, and then fired for taking too many days off from work.
Lee argued that the two workers' rights should be protected under the Civil Servants Employment Law, unless they are afflicted with a highly infectious disease.
"HIV is not a highly infectious disease," he said.
According to Chang, the incident took place some time in July or August last year when the Taipei City Police Headquarters (
"As soon as we found that two of its officers were HIV positive, we notified the city's Bureau of Health (衛生局) and the Cabinet-level Department of Health (衛生署), which later conducted a second round of blood tests and confirmed that these two were actually HIV-positive," she said.
The hospital then sealed off the final test results, which were sent off to the headquarters' personnel department, she said.
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