More than four out of every 10 victims of violence in hospitals suffer from emotional distress afterwards, according to a survey released yesterday by the Taipei City Government’s Department of Health.
The survey, conducted last year, of workers aged between 20 and 55 in the medical, finance, restaurant, manufacturing and electronic engineering industries, found that about 19.8 percent of medical personnel who were victims of workplace violence had experienced medium levels of psychological distress.
A higher percentage of the same group of hospital employees — 23.8 percent — said they were severely troubled by emotional problems, while another 11.9 percent said they had had suicidal thoughts, the poll found.
“The department received 31 assault complaints from 14 medical institutions last year, compared with 40 reports in 2013. Ninety percent of the incidents occurred during the early hours of the morning, as that is the time of the day when hospitals have the fewest employees on duty,” Medical Affairs Division Director Liu Yueh-ping (劉越萍) told a news conference in Taipei.
Ten perpertrators of such violence have been fined NT$30,000 each in accordance with the Medical Care Act (醫療法), Liu said.
Liu said the majority of last year’s reported assault cases — 45.2 percent — involved both verbal and physical violence, while verbal attacks accounted for 29 percent of the reports and physical assault accounted for 25.8 percent.
“Hospitals are most short-staffed overnight and that can increase the possibility of a misunderstanding in communication between medical personnel and patients or their families,” Liu said.
However, mutual understanding and tolerance are required from both sides for patients to receive the best possible medical care, she said.
The survey received a total of 1,539 valid responses. No margin of error was given.
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
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
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