Only 14 out of the more than 1,000 long-term care facilities in the nation are ranked as first-rate institutions by the government, Saint Mary’s Hospital Luodong superintendent Chen Yong-shing (陳永興) said yesterday, citing a government study.
According to a 2010 evaluation conducted by the Ministry of the Interior, only 1 percent of the 1,033 nursing homes or long-term care facilities in Taiwan are rated as excellent, Chen said, adding that the average waiting time for a bed in these institutions is three months.
He said a shortage of certified long-term carers and nurses was the main cause of the low quality of these facilities and prevented them from improving their services.
Chen called on the government to solve the problem by enacting measures such as amending laws to encourage or require corporations to invest in long-term care facilities or establishing a mechanism to offer financial aid to medical students who decided to enter the field.
“In Yilan County, there were 299 new nurses in one year, but 209 left the workforce during the same time,” he said. “For instance, Saint Mary’s Hospital Luodong [in the county’s Luodong Township (羅東)] is 89 nurses short, 21 percent of the total number of nurses it needs. At one time, more staff were quitting than being hired.”
The shortage has had a domino effect on the hospital’s hospice rooms, with “seven beds closed due to a lack of nurses,” Chen said.
Long-term carers are in high demand as well. The Bureau of Employment and Vocational Training trains about 6,000 long-term carers every year, but the turnover rate is as high as 70 percent, he said.
“A lot of nurses and carers leave due to a stressful and poorly equipped work environment and low salary,” Chen said, urging the new Ministry of Health and Welfare to pass the long-term care services draft act to improve the quality of healthcare services for the rapidly growing elderly population.
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