On International Nurses Day yesterday, nurses rights groups appealed for improvements in working conditions.
Among the practices they are unhappy about include being expected to take care of more than ten patients at a time and working over the regulation eight hours per day.
On a day intended to honor nurses around the world, held to coincide with the birthday of nursing pioneer Florence Nightingale, Son Yu-lian (
PHOTO: LIAO YAO-TUNG, TAIPEI TIMES
Jane Lu (
There is no law that stipulates the maximum number of patients a nurse can take care of during one shift, Lu said.
According to Lu, in California, the law stipulates that a nurse should look after no more than five patients. In Taiwan however, a nurse may be responsible for 10 patients in one shift and up to 14 during a night shift, she added.
A nurse, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that she felt stressed when having to take care of so many patients and that just taking the blood pressure of 10 patients can take up to two hours.
"I really am worried about the patients," the nurse said. "I cannot take good care of all of them because there are too many and I work ten to twelve hour days. When nurses are too tired, it is dangerous for the patients, because we may be prone to making mistakes," she said.
Lu also said that nurses were never paid for working overtime and 545 of the nurses polled responded that they had no time to take advanced nursing courses because of their long working hours.
Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Huang Sue-ying (
To prevent hospitals from hiring nurses just for yearly evaluations, the department should make unannounced inspections, Huang said.
Huang added that since most nurses were women, hospitals may expect them to make more sacrifices such as working overtime.
Lu said the health department established the Bureau of Nursing and Health Services Development last year after complaints from nurses. However, the bureau handles affairs other than nursing so not many changes have been implemented, Lu said.
An unnamed bureau official said surveys regarding nurse-patient ratios have recently been conducted, but since the bureau is new and handles other health affairs, there is still room for improvement.
"All the nurses want is a better, safer working environment," Lu said. "After all, those who take care of us need to be taken care of as well."
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching