The National Taiwan University Hospital (NTUH) yesterday said it does not have a special procedure for treating legislators, while Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) said he used to ask legislators to wait in line like everyone else when he worked at the hospital.
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislators Lin Yi-hua (林奕華) and Chen Yu-jen (陳玉珍) were taken to the hospital’s emergency room after they said they were injured on Friday when a group of KMT legislators and Taipei City Councilors tried to force their way into the Ministry of Foreign Affairs building demanding to see Minister of Foreign Affairs Joseph Wu (吳釗燮).
Chen was placed on a bed in a separate room in the acute and critical care section, after her fingers were caught in a door during the scuffle, and she said she felt dizzy and had difficulty breathing.
Photo: Liao Chen-huei, Taipei Times
Photographs posted online by the KMT showing many party officials visiting the legislators in the emergency room on Saturday sparked a public outcry over the perceived abuse of medical resources.
An Internet user on Sunday posted a flow chart reportedly from the hospital, titled “Procedures for treating legislators or patients they entrusted,” on a physicians’ forum, instructing that if a legislator arrives at the emergency room, they should be placed in the acute and critical care section for treatment or observation.
The hospital issued a statement saying that the flow chart was drawn up more than 10 years ago, but it was not approved by hospital management and is not part of medical professionals’ work procedure.
“When there is a vacancy in the acute and critical care section, the hospital will assist public figures by placing them in separate rooms,” it said, “but we will also inform them that the emergency room is a medical operation area, so interviewing or filming is prohibited, as it involves exposing patient privacy, and that the patient should not be accompanied by more than two people.”
All the patients have been admitted after going through triage and standard procedures so that other patients’ right to healthcare would not be affected, the hospital said.
The hospital apologized to anyone who was affected by the incident.
Ko, who was the head of the hospital’s traumatology department before becoming mayor, was asked about the issue.
“It certainly was not drafted by me,” he said as he looked at the flow chart.
“When I was at the NTUH, the department I was in charge of did not have this SOP [standard operating procedure], but that was five years ago, and I do not know if they changed,” Ko said. “Usually when legislators came, we would tell them to wait in line.”
Considering that most countries issue more than five denominations of banknotes, the central bank has decided to redesign all five denominations, the bank said as it prepares for the first major overhaul of the banknotes in more than 24 years. Central bank Governor Yang Chin-lung (楊金龍) is expected to report to the Legislative Yuan today on the bank’s operations and the redesign’s progress. The bank in a report sent to the legislature ahead of today’s meeting said it had commissioned a survey on the public’s preferences. Survey results showed that NT$100 and NT$1,000 banknotes are the most commonly used, while NT$200 and NT$2,000
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) yesterday reported the first case of a new COVID-19 subvariant — BA.3.2 — in a 10-year-old Singaporean girl who had a fever upon arrival in Taiwan and tested positive for the disease. The girl left Taiwan on March 20 and the case did not have a direct impact on the local community, it said. The WHO added the BA.3.2 strain to its list of Variants Under Monitoring in December last year, but this was the first imported case of the COVID-19 variant in Taiwan, CDC Deputy Director-General Lin Ming-cheng (林明誠) said. The girl arrived in Taiwan on
South Korea is planning to revise its controversial electronic arrival card, a step Taiwanese officials said prompted them to hold off on planned retaliatory measures, a South Korean media report said yesterday. A Yonhap News Agency report said that the South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs is planning to remove the “previous departure place” and “next destination” fields from its e-arrival card system. The plan, reached after interagency consultations, is under review and aims to simplify entry procedures and align the electronic form with the paper version, a South Korean ministry official said. The fields — which appeared only on the electronic form
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) is suspending retaliation measures against South Korea that were set to take effect tomorrow, after Seoul said it is updating its e-arrival system, MOFA said today. The measures were to be a new round of retaliation after Taiwan on March 1 changed South Korea's designation on government-issued alien resident certificates held by South Korean nationals to "South Korea” from the "Republic of Korea," the country’s official name. The move came after months of protests to Seoul over its listing of Taiwan as "China (Taiwan)" in dropdown menus on its new online immigration entry system. MOFA last week
RSS