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Taiwan lags in pediatric care, report says

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.
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