The Ministry of Health and Welfare (MOHW) has announced new measures to ease emergency room overcrowding during the upcoming Lunar New Year holiday after Taiwan faced a serious overcrowding strain last year that was called “unprecedented.”
Emergency room visits during the Lunar New Year holiday typically climb to 1.5 to 1.7 times the normal daily average because of visits by mostly noncritical cases, largely driven by cold weather, and gatherings that fuel respiratory infections and viral gastroenteritis, the ministry said.
The situation is also exacerbated by fewer primary care clinics operating.
Photo: Taipei Times
Those factors came to a head last year when emergency rooms were so overcrowded, the Taiwan Society of Emergency Medicine described it as “unprecedented.”
To improve access to medical care during this year’s holiday from Feb. 14 to Feb. 22, the ministry said that the 13 urgent care centers nationwide would close only on Lunar New Year’s Eve (Feb. 16) and the second-to-last day of the holiday (Feb. 21).
They are to operate on the other seven days to provide services in internal medicine, general surgery, pediatrics and orthopedics.
Launched in Taiwan’s six major cities in early November last year, the urgent care centers program normally offers medical services from 8am to midnight on Sundays and national holidays to divert non-emergency patients and ease pressure on hospitals.
Deputy Minister of Health and Welfare Chuang Jen-hsiang (莊人祥) said patients with gastrointestinal, infectious or lower respiratory illnesses can also seek care at designated “emergency responsibility hospitals” that are to open infectious disease clinics from the first to the third day of the Lunar New Year (Feb. 17 to Feb. 19).
Emergency responsibility hospitals are facilities designated under a tiered emergency medical system to provide round-the-clock emergency care in their service areas, with 204 nationwide as of September last year.
Extra precautions would also be taken to prevent transmission of the flu, which could be exacerbated by holiday travel, Centers for Disease Control Director-General Philip Lo (羅一鈞) said.
The Centers for Disease Control would broaden eligibility for publicly funded flu antivirals from Jan. 20 to Feb. 28 for people with flu-like symptoms who belong to “high transmission” groups, including medical workers and long-term care facility workers, he said.
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