Rampant labor violations at major hospitals have proven that excessive overtime has reached such a level that it is substantially hurting the quality of care provided to patients, the Taiwan Healthcare Reform Foundation said yesterday.
Releasing its latest report on human resources at major hospitals and medical institutions, the foundation said it found that the Taipei Veterans General Hospital did not have enough pharmacists, which forced management to overwork its employees to speed up the processing of prescriptions.
The pharmacists must process one prescription every 4.8 minutes, which is 2.5 times faster than in Japan and therefore makes human error much likelier because of the excessive speed and exhaustion, said Chu Hsieh-kuang (朱顯光), the foundation’s chief of research and development.
The foundation gave the hospital its mock “robotic arms award” for training pharmacists to hand out prescriptions “like robots.”
It also gave a “spinning tops award” to the nursing staff at Chang Gung Memorial Hospital’s Linkou Branch. Not only were regular and intensive care rooms seriously understaffed, but the hospital also failed to pass two out of three human resource evaluations.
The hospital has become a “medical sweatshop,” where nurses spin like a top to tend to as many as eight patients at once, Chu said.
“Overwork does not only affect blue-collar workers or high-tech engineers,” he said. “The serious exploitation of labor that occurs even at respected hospitals shows that the medical profession is not immune to overwork.”
The foundation said data from Council of Labor Affairs inspections showed that excessive overtime had increased from 5.6 percent last year to 8 percent this year
Had doctors been included as part of the labor inspections, the foundation said the data would likely have shown that the overtime situation was even worse.
Of the 50 regional hospitals and medical centers inspected by the council, 16 had committed 30 labor violations. Of those violations, 19 involved working hours, while six involved not implementing a requirement that employees have at least one day off per workweek.
Employers who did not keep updated and accurate records of employee working hours were also common, representing four of the labor violations and applying to 8 percent of the hospitals inspected.
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