Nearly 70 percent of Taiwanese are willing to donate their organs after they die, but only 1 percent have had their consent listed on their National Health Insurance (NHI) cards, a recent survey conducted by the Taiwan Organ Registry and Sharing Center showed.
The survey was conducted in March and showed that “organ donation” is no longer an unfamiliar term for the public, as 67.3 percent of those polled said they would be willing to donate their organs and 78.5 percent are willing to giver their organs to family members.
Eighty-seven percent of those who said “yes” to donating said the reason they agreed to do so is that they want to help those in medical need, while 35.5 of those who would not donate ascribed their unwillingness to religious or spiritual beliefs that a person’s body must remain intact even in death.
Of those who said they would donate, 8.7 percent have signed an organ donor consent form and 91.2 percent have not, the survey showed.
Even though 81.9 percent of those polled who have not signed the form said they are interested in doing so, only 1 percent of the population — 218,000 people — has done so, the center said, citing data provided by the Ministry of Health and Welfare.
An amendment to the Organ Transplant Act (人體器官移植條例) passed in 2011 states that after the consent form has been signed, the information will be automatically stored on the donor’s NHI card, without them having to take any further action.
Yet the survey found that 65.2 percent of participants are unaware of the amendment, while 66.6 percent do not know that after their consent is registered, it is legally binding.
Center chairman Lee Po-chang (李伯璋) said the public’s level of familiarity with the NHI card-bound consent and its legal commitment is low and the government needs to act to raise awareness and understanding of organ donation.
Some experts have expressed concerns over the consequences of integrating donor consent into the NHI system, saying that doctors having access to the consent registry could prevent them from doing their best to save a patient to acquire an organ, Lee said.
“That is highly unlikely and also illogical because doctors still need the consent of the patient’s immediate family to remove an organ from a deceased patient,” Lee said.
Lee also said that although donating livers, hearts and lungs is seen as more urgent because these organs often involve matters of life or death, kidney donations are also needed and should be encouraged.
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:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
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