A woman who suffered severe head injuries on Tuesday in a scooter accident on Siaoliouciou Island (小琉球) off Pingtung County died because she could not be transported to medical facilities in Donggang Township (東港) to receive critical medical attention due to their being no qualified captain for the medical transportation ship stationed at the island.
According to local police, the woman, surnamed Huang (黃), was hit by a scooter when she stepped outside her house and she sustained head wounds in the accident.
The township’s public health center said it was only able to treat emergencies and called for the medical ship to be readied to take Huang to Taiwan proper. However, the center was told that without a qualified captain, the boat was by law not allowed to depart.
The township office then called the state-owned ferry traveling between the island and the mainland to return to the island to pick Huang up, but her condition deteriorated on the journey because of a lack of medical equipment on the ferry.
By the time Huang arrived at Donggang Township’s An Tai Hospital, her pupils were dilated and a doctor said she was past the window for medical attention. She died shortly afterward.
Huang’s daughter, Chen Ching-ching (陳青青), criticized the township office and said it was directly responsible for her mother’s death.
“There’s a ship right there [on the island], but the people in need of its services cannot use it,” Chen said, adding that she could not accept the township’s refusal to use the medical boat.
Chen said that no one would accept that the township refused to use the boat, the only source of transport of injured patients in a town sorely lacking medical resources, on the grounds of “lacking a captain.”
Other residents asked whether the township’s 5,000 residents and more than 1,000 tourists staying over on the island every night should just pray that they do not get sick or injured in accidents.
Some residents said they were kept in the dark about the medical transport ship being unable to leave port, with some likening the incident to how residents of Greater Kaohsiung City did not know that there were pipelines carrying propene passing under their houses.
On Thursday night last week, Greater Kaohsiung erupted in gas explosions due to leaky pipelines allegedly filled to bursting with propene gas, which killed 30 people and injured at least 310.
Siaoliouciou is about 12.5km out to sea from Donggang Township, the township said, adding that the ferry could reach the township in about 15 minutes, while the medical ship would take 30 minutes to reach shore.
Township chief Tsai Tian-yu (蔡天裕) said the ferry is operated by the township office, while the medical transportation ship belongs to the county government.
He added that two captains do duty on the medical ship and according to regulations, a captain planning to leave his job has to tender his resignation one month in advance to give the county government time to find a substitute captain.
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Pingtung City Councilor Wang Wei-ming (王薇茗) said that two groups of captains should have been on standby around the clock.
However, Wang said, both captains left their jobs at the end of last month, but the Department of Health had failed to notify the local authorities and also failed to come up with a contingency plan in case of emergencies.
The county government immediately found replacement captains after Huang’s death, which shows that it only acted retroactively and did not proactively made arrangements to avert such tragedies, Wang said.
However, departmental head Lee Chien-ting (李建廷) said that the new captains were due to report for duty on Wednesday.
He added that no one could have anticipated the incident involving Huang happening during the window period that the medical ship was without a qualified captain.
Huang’s family said they consider the civil servant who approved both captains to leave service at the same time to bear collateral responsibility, adding that they are not ruling out asking the government for compensation because of her death.
“We hope that government officials would grow a conscience after this incident and establish an expedited method for medical transportation between the islet and Taiwan,” the family members 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