Nursing experts described yesterday PFP legislators' proposal to label all drug bottles in Chinese to prevent medical blunders as "impossible."
"Labeling all drug bottles in Chinese will only create more confusion and medical errors," said Tsay Shiow-luan (
Tsay's remarks came at the inaugrual Southeast Asia International Conference of Health and Nursing held at NTCN.
PHOTO: SEAN CHAO, TAIPEI TIMES
Three PFP legislators proposed on Thursday to amend the Pharmaceutical Affairs Law (
The proposal follows two hospital deaths linked to staff being unable to read the English on vaccine and drug containers.
"The most effective way to prevent similar situations is to develop nurses' capacity to do research and solve problems on their own," said Tsay.
Tsay said, as new drugs come out all the time, it is impossible to translate all drug names into Chinese.
Kao Yu-hsiu (
According to Tsay, nursing students are all required to recognize drugs by their English names.
Tsay added that it is very unfair to apportion the entire blame on the nurse at the center of the recent Peicheng Hospital tragedy where a newborn baby died after being administered the wrong drug.
She stressed that to improve medical quality, it is essential to ease nurses' workloads and increase their salaries.
Parents of the dead baby, as well as the relatives of six others who also recieved the wrong drug but survived, filed a lawsuit against two of the Taipei hospital's nurses for negligent injuries yesterday morning.
Relatives also demanded the hospital pay NT$3 million to the parents of each baby.
They said that if the hospital fails to carry out their request, they would consider filing another lawsuit against the hospital's director, Hsu Mu-chan (
The hospital and the parents held a third round of negotiations last night.
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