With a rapidly aging population and a cash-strapped National Health Insurance system, the government is paying more attention to the issue of “futile medical care,” treatment applied only to prolong life without a foreseeable cure or positive outcome, and the prospect of hospice care.
In a seminar held by medical groups yesterday, National Taiwan University Hospital (NTUH) Jinshan Branch Superintendent Huang Sheng-Jean (黃勝堅) made a presentation on how the community hospital he directs in Jinshan established the first hospice community in Taiwan.
Huang was assigned to the post by NTUH less than two years ago, when the hospital planned to initiate a pilot program promoting local, close-to-home healthcare and hospice community care in the district.
“Physicians at Jinshan branch don’t just stay in the hospital. They visit patients and their families at home and participate in community health-promotion activities to relate to local people,” Huang said.
The hospital is now employing the capitation payment system, which can be seen as a family practice system, Huang said, with a physician taking care of a number of patients closely instead of being visited by patients randomly.
The system works under the idea that pain prevention is more important than treatment, Huang added, stressing that this kind of preventive healthcare includes reducing the patient’s and their family’s suffering at the end of their life.
“Of the NT$570 billion [US$18.9 billion] healthcare expenditure paid by the NHI, about NT$170 billion is spent on futile medical treatment,” Huang said. “By operating preventive healthcare, including building quality end-of-life care and promoting the signing of DNR [do not resuscitate] to have ‘a good death,’ a lot can be saved, benefiting the sustainability of the NHI system.”
“The rate of the patients under end-of-life care that had signed the DNR was 9.2 per 1,000 last year, compared with a national rate of 6.3 per 1,000,” Huang said, adding that the number is expected to exceed 10 per 1,000 this year.
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