Medical resources allocated to children in Taiwan are inadequate compared with other developed countries, the Child Welfare League Foundation said yesterday.
A report released by the foundation showed that each pediatrician in Taiwan must care for an average of 1,861 children, four times higher than their counterparts in the US and six times higher than in Germany.
The research showed that one of the biggest causes of inadequate medical care was a shortage of pediatricians, with the majority clustered in big cities like Taipei, foundation chairwoman Joyce Feng (馮燕) said.
The organization has been conducting annual research on the well-being of children since 1998.
“If you take your child to see a pediatrician, you will notice that providing medical care for children requires almost twice as many staffers as for adults,” said Frank Huang (黃富源), vice superintendent of Mackay Memorial Hospital.
“With children, [doctors] must do a lot of explaining and thinking and using of hands ... it's a lot of work,” he said.
Although more staffers are needed in pediatrics than in other fields, hospitals cannot afford to allocate more human resources because the National Health Insurance Program doesn't cover these extra costs, said Yeung Chun-yan (楊俊仁), a Mackay Memorial Hospital pediatrician and vice secretary-general of Taiwan Pediatric Association.
Despite the need for more medical resources, the patient-to-doctor ratio for pediatricians is 36 percent higher than the 1,368 for the general patient-to-doctor ratio in Taiwan, the report said.
“Taiwan ranks last in newborn birth rate, but ranks fourth highest in the death rate of children under five years old,” Feng said.
Feng said the National Health Insurance Program does not allocate enough resources for children. She said that in 2004, children under 14 years of age comprised almost 20 percent of the population, but only about 10 percent of the funding was allocated to them.
Yan Dah-chin (顏大欽), a pediatrician and secretary-general of the Child Health Promotion Society of the ROC, said he had a young patient who was hospitalized a week after developing streptococcus pneumoniae because the parent could not afford the NT$12,000 needed for the vaccine.
“Tomorrow [Nov. 20] is Universal Children's Day; we hope that the government and the public will pay more attention to the well-being of our future generation,” Feng said.
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
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:
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
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