Taipei’s and New Taipei City’s disaster evacuation procedures should be more closely integrated, Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) said yesterday.
Both cities’ hospitals were flooded with patients following an inferno at the Formosa Fun Coast (八仙海岸) water park in New Taipei City’s Bali District (八里) on Saturday, which injured almost 500 people.
Although Taipei and New Taipei City are a single metropolitan area, we still have two separate administrative systems,” Ko said, adding that many seriously injured victims had been forced to transfer hospitals after they were not sent to the appropriate hospitals in the first instance.
Photo: Tu Chu-min, Taipei Times
Taipei sent 144 ambulances to assist New Taipei City’s disaster response.
Former National Taiwan University Hospital’s Department of Traumatology director Ko on Sunday called for injury reporting to be integrated and digitized across the nation to improve efficiency and coordination across administrative boundaries.
He also suggested that ambulances be provided with tablet computers to enable injuries to be reported in real time instead of waiting until patients arrive at hospitals.
Ko said Taipei would wait for one month before deciding on any specific emergency response reforms, adding that plans for treating injuries after a major natural disaster — such as an earthquake — would also be reviewed.
Following a meeting with New Taipei City Deputy Mayor Kao Chung-cheng (高宗正), Taipei Deputy Mayor Teng Chia-chi (鄧家基) said that the cities would explore ways of integrating their respective emergency operations centers to unify ambulance dispatches and the hospitals to which patients are evacuated.
He added that the Taipei City Government was reviewing how to integrate resources and manpower from the armed forces and national agencies in the event of a natural disaster.
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