Taiwan has the world’s largest national network of health promoting hospitals, with 130 health service providers being recognized as members of a WHO network, Director-General of the Health and Promotion Administration (HPA) Chiou Shu-ti (邱淑媞) said yesterday.
The International Network of Health Promoting Hospitals & Health Services (HPH) began as a WHO pilot project and became a non-governmental organization on its own in 2008.
The project aims to support better healthcare by providing facilities toward placing more emphasis on health promotion and integrating disease prevention work with daily diagnostic services, Chou said.
Increasingly, as non-communicable diseases (NCDs) have been recognized by the WHO as one of the key challenges to post-2015 human development, reducing risk factors and creating health-promoting environments are upheld as important steps to prevent and control NCDs, Chiou added.
“It is to transform passive medical services, in the sense that they are curative services provided according to developed symptoms and diseases, into what is ‘foresighted’ care, by collaboration between the medical system and local communities,” she said.
Foresighted preventive care provides holistic health management and implements heath promotion and active aging, Chou said.
This makes people more healthy with extended life expectancy, alleviating the pressure on frontline healthcare workers and lessening the nation’s burden when it comes to medical and long-term care expenses, she added.
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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