President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) said yesterday that he has asked the Department of Health (DOH) to coordinate with private hospitals to give medical professionals a pay raise of at least 3 percent.
Noting that civil servants are due to get a 3 percent salary increase with effect from July 1, Ma said he has asked the department to help do the same in private hospitals.
Addressing the shortage of hospital nursing staff, the president said the department had allocated a special fund of NT$1 billion (US$34.7 million) to increase the number of nurses.
“The amount will be further increased to NT$2 billion,” he said during a meeting with medical professionals at Mackay Memorial Hospital.
The nurse-to-patient ratio will be included in hospital assessments in the future and the government will work hard to ensure nurses “get off duty on time,” he added.
The department recently said that it plans to increase the number of nurses in Taiwan to help address the shortage of nursing staff.
Department of Health Minister Chiu Wen-ta (邱文達), also present at the event, said the nurse-to-patient ratio would be increased from 1:4 to 1:3.
There are about 224,000 registered nurses nationwide, but less than 60 percent of them are currently working in that profession, according to the National Union of Nurses’ Associations.
Only 17 percent of the nurses who responded to a recent survey conducted by the organization said they were willing to stay in their jobs for the next three years.
Among those who said they would not stay that long, the main reasons cited were low pay, heavy workload and high pressure.
Ma said that expenditure on the national healthcare system had increased from 6.2 percent of GDP three years ago to 6.7 percent now.
He expressed the hope that the figure would be increased to 7.5 percent of GDP in the not too distant future.
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:
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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