The Taiwan Medical Alliance for Labor Justice and Patient Safety (TMAL) yesterday urged Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) lawmakers to withdraw a draft amendment seeking to mandate that all medical records be transcribed in Chinese, saying it could impede physician-patient communication and the country’s endeavors to promote international medical exchanges.
The draft amendment was proposed by 19 DPP legislators, including Yu Mei-nu (尤美女), last month as a part of Article 12 of the Physicians Act (醫師法), requiring doctors to transcribe the date of diagnosis, examined items and results, treatments and diagnosis, as well as progress of treatment or medication, in Chinese.
The group said that it is a basic right of patients to be comprehensively informed about their diagnosis, the treatments they are administered and their prognosis, and that transcribing medical records in a foreign language could easily lead to legal wrangling.
“The proposed policy could endanger patients,” TMAL chairman Chong Chee-fah (張志華) said. “English has long been the main language used by medical schools in teaching doctors and by medical personnel in communicating with others, including in the event of an emergency.”
“Forcing doctors to use Mandarin could impede their efforts in rescuing critically injured patients, particularly when the government has yet to build a standardized database for translated medical terminology,” Chong said.
Chong, who doubles as the director of Shin-Kong Wu Ho-Su Memorial Hospital’s emergency unit, said the current law allows physicians to transcribe medical records in whatever language they see fit, be it English, Mandarin or even Taiwanese.
Patients who want to know more about their diagnosis are also given the option to apply for a Chinese-language abstract of their medical records or diagnosis statement, Chong said, adding that the proposed plan would only set back the nation’s medical advancements and hinder its international medical exchanges with other countries.
However, the medical community is largely divided on the issue.
Taiwan Healthcare Reform Foundation chairman Liu Mei-chun (劉梅君) said that, since the information written in medical records pertains mainly to patients themselves, it should be expressed in a language comprehensible to them.
“With the government’s promotion of a shift to electronic medical records in recent years, the draft amendment will allow patients to learn about their medical conditions on the Internet in the near future and spare them the trouble of making a trip to a hospital to apply for a Chinese-version medical abstract,” Liu said.
Liu also dismissed the alliance’s warning of impeded medical exchanges, saying that many of Taiwan’s neighbors, such as Japan and South Korea, also require their doctors to transcribe medical records in their local language, but none are lagging behind in medical advances.
Yu said the alliance had overreacted, because the draft amendments aimed only to safeguard patients’ right to know about their status.
“While patients have always been the recipient of advice in their relationship with doctors, they should be allowed to be the masters of their own health,” Yu said, adding that the draft bill was still in the early stages of legislative approval and that other opinions were welcomed.
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