New Taipei City Mayor Hou You-yi (侯友宜), the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) presidential candidate, pledged yesterday to gradually raise Taiwan’s health spending to eventually comprise 8 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) in a bid to tackle the country’s acute nurse shortage.
Taiwan’s current health spending, which equates to 6.1 percent of its GDP, is much lower than countries such as Japan (11.1 percent), South Korea (8.4 percent) and Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) members (9.6 percent), Hou said on his Facebook page.
To fundamentally address the nurse shortage, it is important to raise salary levels for all nurses, regardless of shift type, Hou said, in contrast with the proposal made by Vice President William Lai (賴清德), the Democratic Progressive Party’s presidential candidate.
Photo: Taipei Times
On Wednesday, Lai called for higher salaries and a better work environment for nursing staff, in particular for those working evening and graveyard shifts.
The next day, the Executive Yuan approved a 12-point incentive program — which included retention and night shift incentives, overhauling the work environment and implementing a standard 1-3 nurse to patient ratio per shift.
The incentives, which would be partly funded by Taiwan’s National Health Insurance (NHI) program, would cost around NT$18 billion (US$558.8 million) per year, and are expected to help recruit an additional 67,000 to 78,000 nurses a year from next year to 2030, health ministry officials reported.
186,000 nurses are currently practicing across Taiwan, meaning there is a workforce gap of 55,000 to 74,000 nurses, according to the ministry.
As part of the program, the ministry would also provide extra incentives for nurses working unsociable hours — NT$400 to NT$600 per shift for the evening shift and NT$600 to NT$1,000 for the night shift.
However, Hou said that treating nurses differently depending on what shift they work could create tension and result in difficulties in arranging shifts.
In addition, such incentives should be funded through a government budget instead of an NHI budget, because the latter is on the brink of insolvency, he said.
Lai’s campaign office said Hou “maliciously” distorted Lai’s proposal, which it said plans to “address different problems at different stages.”
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