The inclusion of community pharmacies into the second-generation Smoking Cessation Program in September 2012 has made tobacco cessation treatment and knowledge more accessible to smokers and has helped almost 3,000 people quit smoking, Health Promotion Administration Deputy Director-General Yu Li-hui (游麗惠) said yesterday.
“As of last month, a total of 9,157 smokers have turned to pharmacies in their communities for smoking cessation consultations and medications and about 3,000 of them have succeeded in quitting,” Yu told a press conference in Taipei.
Yu said the second-generation program has authorized 429 pharmacies nationwide to provide nonprescription smoking cessation treatments, such as nicotine patches and gum.
It has helped save more than NT$16 million (US$529,000) in medical costs that would have been paid by the National Health Insurance (NHI) program and is expected to create long-term economic benefits amounting to NT$1.2 billion, Yu said.
Under the first-generation program, smokers who wanted to quit had to make a doctor’s appointment at a hospital to obtain cessation treatments and were required to pay all the costs beyond the maximum weekly subsidy of NT$250.
Yu said the old policy impeded some smokers’ willingness to get over the addiction, primarily because they were either too busy with work to visit a hospital, were afraid to be labeled as a patient or were daunted by the extra medication costs that could amount to between NT$550 and NT$1,250 per week.
In view of this, the health agency in March 2012 launched the second-generation program to allow hospitals’ admission departments and emergency rooms to provide smoking cessation treatment, before also extending the authorization to local pharmacies in September of the same year.
Currently, smokers who use community pharmacies not only save on the registration fee required at a hospital, but pay 20 percent of the total cost of cessation treatments.
One of the successful quitters is 54-year-old Lee Chang-fa (李長發), a 30-year smoker and father of three daughters.
Lee said he had thought about quitting for some time, “however, as a busy salesman, I could not find the time to go to a hospital and had no choice but to shelve the plan.”
Lee said his problem was solved after he noticed a poster promoting the tobacco cessation program outside a pharmacy in Taipei’s Neihu District (內湖) last year.
“After evaluating my condition, a pharmacist there, named Wang Cheng-yi (汪政毅), prescribed nicotine patches and gum. Whenever I felt like smoking, I would go to him and ask for advice. Seven months later, I finally succeeded,” Lee said, adding that he has not smoked for nearly a year.
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