Changes to evaluation standards for hospitals would harm quality by dropping mandatory “patient-to-caregiver” ratios, representatives of medical professional associations said.
Officials from 10 professional and academic medical associations gathered at the offices of the Taiwan Healthcare Reform Foundation yesterday to protest proposed changes to hospital performance assessments, accusing the Ministry of Health and Welfare of “foul play” for proposing “assessment simplifications” leading to “personnel cuts.”
While performance assessments should be simplified, the nation’s low patient-to-caregiver ratio should protect that requirement, foundation chairwoman Joanne Liu (劉淑瓊) said, criticizing the ministry’s plan to switch to “passive monitoring,” which would require hospitals to publish their “patient-to-caregiver” ratios, while removing the data from consideration during performance assessments.
“The ministry is basically saying that hospitals can do what they want on the matter and it will not regulate them as long as they put the data online,” Liu said, calling for better standards to prevent hospitals from “cooking the books” on personnel hours.
“Even if people went to the trouble of looking up the data, they would not be able to understand it,” she said.
The ministry performs routine performance assessments of hospitals to determine their pay tiers according to the National Health Insurance system, with institutions competing to be designated as a “medical center,” the tier which receives the highest payouts.
Relatively high patient-to-caregiver ratios were added to the assessments in 2008 following protests from labor groups and they serve as a “must pass” criteria for higher pay tier designation, regardless of the scores in other areas, Liu said.
Removing the ratio requirement would likely lead to hospitals cutting the number of pathologists, despite months-long waiting periods patients face for some treatments, Taiwan Speech Language Pathologist Union president Joyce Su (蘇心怡) said.
“This has to do with National Health Insurance pay formulas — because the formula for our type of service is relatively low, hospitals do not view it as profitable,” Su said.
Hospitals’ unwillingness to hire personnel means that young hearing therapists are unable to find work, Taiwan Speech-Language-Hearing Association vice chairman Yeh Wen-ying (葉文英) said.
Taiwan would benefit from more integrated military strategies and deployments if the US and its allies treat the East China Sea, the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea as a “single theater of operations,” a Taiwanese military expert said yesterday. Shen Ming-shih (沈明室), a researcher at the Institute for National Defense and Security Research, said he made the assessment after two Japanese military experts warned of emerging threats from China based on a drill conducted this month by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) Eastern Theater Command. Japan Institute for National Fundamentals researcher Maki Nakagawa said the drill differed from the
‘WORSE THAN COMMUNISTS’: President William Lai has cracked down on his political enemies and has attempted to exterminate all opposition forces, the chairman said The legislature would motion for a presidential recall after May 20, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) said yesterday at a protest themed “against green communists and dictatorship” in Taipei. Taiwan is supposed to be a peaceful homeland where people are united, but President William Lai (賴清德) has been polarizing and tearing apart society since his inauguration, Chu said. Lai must show his commitment to his job, otherwise a referendum could be initiated to recall him, he said. Democracy means the rule of the people, not the rule of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), but Lai has failed to fulfill his
A rally held by opposition parties yesterday demonstrates that Taiwan is a democratic country, President William Lai (賴清德) said yesterday, adding that if opposition parties really want to fight dictatorship, they should fight it on Tiananmen Square in Beijing. The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) held a protest with the theme “against green communists and dictatorship,” and was joined by the Taiwan People’s Party. Lai said the opposition parties are against what they called the “green communists,” but do not fight against the “Chinese communists,” adding that if they really want to fight dictatorship, they should go to the right place and face
A 79-year-old woman died today after being struck by a train at a level crossing in Taoyuan, police said. The woman, identified by her surname Wang (王), crossed the tracks even though the barriers were down in Jhongli District’s (中壢) Neili (內壢) area, the Taoyuan Branch of the Railway Police Bureau said. Surveillance footage showed that the railway barriers were lowered when Wang entered the crossing, but why she ventured onto the track remains under investigation, the police said. Police said they received a report of an incident at 6:41am involving local train No. 2133 that was heading from Keelung to Chiayi City. Investigators
RSS