TWO TAIPEI HOSPITALS LABELED AS "SWEATSHOPS"

According to the Taiwan Health Care Reform Foundation's latest evaluation report, Linkou's Chang Gung Memorial Hospital and Taipei Veterans General Hospital are graded as sweatshop hospitals for overworking their employees.

The foundation is calling the Department of Health to curb the problem and ensure the medical quality for the public. In response, the two hospitals said that they have improved the work environment and the foundation was actually using outdated data to conduct the survey.

Taipei Veterans General Hospital's pharmacists have an extremely heavy workload, and the Taiwan Health Care Reform Foundation recently compared them to mechanical arms.

The pharmacists process one prescription every 4.8 minutes, and package medication at a speed 2.5 times higher than in Japan. The Foundation recently branded TVGH and Linkou's Chang Gung Memorial Hospital as "sweatshop hospitals," likening nurses at Chang Gung to Beyblades.

Chang Gung's patient wards and ICUs are extremely understaffed, and nurses work overtime daily to make sure patients are taken care of.

Chang Gung recently issued a press release to respond to the foundation's accusations, saying that every hospital in Taiwan is dealing with a shortage of nurses, but that it raises nurses' wages and expands the scope of its recruitment activities every year.

Based on Council of Labor Affairs data, the foundation says that the medical care industry is at the top of the "high pressure and exhaustion" occupation list.

According to the data, 32% of hospitals are in violation of labor laws and the percentage of hospitals in violation of overtime regulations increased from 5.6% in 2010 to 8% in 2011.

Experts are calling on the Department of Health to raise review standards for hospitals and medical centers and release work shift and pay data for hospitals to guarantee the quality of service of medical professionals.

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