Hundreds of people, including nursing home operators and families with elderly relatives, staged a demonstration outside the Ministry of the Interior yesterday, protesting new standards for nursing homes that are set to come into effect as early as next week.
Throwing adult diapers and calling for Minister of the Interior Lee Hong-yuan (李鴻源) to step down, a crowd of about 400 people with 200 wheelchairs protested against new rules for nursing facilities yesterday afternoon.
“As many as 18,000 seniors might have nowhere to go, if the government enacts the new nursing home standards as scheduled, because more than 600 such facilities — accounting for more than 60 percent of all nursing homes — could be forced to close,” Taipei City Association for Service of Senior Citizens chairman Chu Wei-jen (朱偉仁) said. “This is a serious issue that the government needs to handle with great care.”
In 2007, the ministry adopted a new set of standards for nursing homes, with a five-year period for their introduction, Chu said.
Although the new standards for manpower will come into effect on Wednesday, and those for hardware by the end of the year, most private nursing homes have not yet upgraded, he said.
“During the five-year introductory period, the government provided no guidance about what we should do and when we went and asked for help, they just ignored us,” Chu said.
“The government should take care of seniors, but unfortunately, it has offered no assistance as we struggle to look after elderly family members,” National Union of Long Term Care Development Associations Taiwan president Liu Yung (劉勇) told the crowd. “The government changed the rules and left us not knowing what to do.”
Small privately operated nursing homes are major providers of care for seniors nationwide, but they have found it difficult to upgrade their labor force and facilities to the new requirements, Liu said.
“However, when these small nursing homes disappear, people will be forced to send seniors to larger nursing homes, which could cost up to NT$30,000 a month for each individual — almost three times as much as smaller facilities,” he said. “I do not think most families are going to be able to afford that.”
Convenience is another issue, because most nursing homes are located in the communities where the seniors and their families live, he said.
“That makes it easier for families to visit regularly, or to use nursing homes as daycare centers when they have to work during the day,” he said.
Democratic Progressive Party legislators Liu Chien-kuo (劉建國) and Chen Ou-po (陳歐珀) took part in the demonstration, and promised to help promote a dialogue between the demonstrators and the ministry.
A specialist from the ministry’s Department of Social Affairs received the demonstrators and promised to look into their petition.
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods