The Taiwan Healthcare Reform Foundation yesterday called on the government to improve its policies on integrating the medical services for holistic healthcare, because the existing plans and pilot programs have been found to be widely inadequate.
Elderly people now account for 11.2 percent of the nation’s population, according to the foundation, reminding the government that Taiwan is now ranked one of the most rapidly graying countries in the world and requires a comprehensive healthcare system for its seniors.
The foundation has found in a survey that 58 percent of family members of elders find it tiring to frequently accompany seniors to visit doctors and 36.1 percent said that taking the elderly, who often suffer from multiple ailments, to visit all the medical specialists that need be visited is time-consuming and exhausting.
Foundation chairwoman Liu Mei-chun (劉梅君) said that NT$1.5 billion (US$51 million) has been allocated from 2009 to the end of last year for a pilot program working on the patient-centered integration of the outpatient care services within hospitals.
“However, so far only 170,000 elderly people, or less than 7 percent of the total elderly population, have benefited from it,” she said.
What is more, while the program has been designed to take care of people with multiple medical conditions, “as many as 67 percent of the service users on record are patients with only one chronic illness,” Liu said.
The National Health Insurance (NHI) administration has also been promoting for nine years the integration and construction of community healthcare systems that emphasize the role of family physicians, doling out a total of NT$8.3 billion, the foundation said.
“However, only 17.8 percent of those surveyed know about the service, and only 17 percent of those who have benefited from the service, which accounts for only 8 percent of the total population using the service,” the foundation said.
The foundation also found that nearly 70 percent of the surveyed family members of elderly people consider duplicate prescriptions a serious problem for seniors, and only one out of every four family members reported being asked by healthcare workers about the medication history of elderly patients.
“The registration of drug use history in the NHI IC card has been advanced for years, but has achieved little because it was not mandatory,” foundation executive director Joanna Liu (劉淑瓊) said.
“Ninety-two percent of the surveyed support establishing a patient’s medication history cloud. The administration should not delay the project any longer,” Liu said.
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