Starting yesterday, hospitals can hire nursing aides for their COVID-19 wards to alleviate the workload on registered nurses, the Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) said.
Many nurses working in COVID-19 wards experience elevated levels of stress, as they need to be extra careful with disease prevention measures, said Minister of Health and Welfare Chen Shih-chung (陳時中), who heads the center.
They spend more time putting on and taking off personal protective equipment, and they provide personal care services that are normally carried out by patients’ caregivers, he said.
Photo: CNA
“The medical tasks performed by registered nurses are already difficult and time-consuming, so the extra duty of providing personal care services becomes very stressful,” he said.
To ease the burden on registered nurses, hospitals may recruit nursing aides, and train them on personal care and infection control, he said.
Nursing aides can help feed, bathe, dress and move the patients, to reduce the stress on registered nurses working in COVID-19 wards, he added.
Nursing aides would be paid NT$5,000 for an eight-hour shift, he said, adding that the general principle is that each nursing aide would take care of six patients per day.
Some hospitals in New Taipei City have already begun recruiting nursing aides for their COVID-19 wards, and hopefully the model will be implemented in more hospitals, to ease the burden on registered nurses taking care of COVID-19 patients, Chen said.
As of 7am yesterday, there were 5,909 vacant beds in COVID-19 wards and negative-pressure isolation wards across the nation, for a vacancy rate of 42.5 percent, he said.
The vacancy rate in northern Taiwan has increased to 51 percent, indicating that fewer people are being hospitalized for COVID-19 there; and the vacancy rates in central and southern Taiwan have dropped to 43.9 percent and 31.5 percent respectively, CECC data showed.
There were also 3,690 unoccupied beds in centralized quarantine facilities — a vacancy rate of 47.1 percent — and 2,114 unoccupied beds in enhanced disease prevention hotels — a vacancy rate of 45.4 percent — the data showed.
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