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1. About Us -> History and Mission
Founded in 2001 by a group of enthusiastic scholars, Taiwan Health Care Reform Foundation (THRF) is an independent, non-governmental organization that aims to improve the healthcare quality and patient’s rights in Taiwan.
The foundation exists because we, as members of this society, have observed, or personally experienced the flaws within Taiwan’s healthcare environment.
The backbone of Taiwan’s healthcare is based on a universal insurance coverage ?the National Health Insurance (NHI) system. Unfortunately, the quality of system is often compromised by substandard services, obscure legislations, unfair distribution of medical resources, mounting budget deficit, weak patient-doctor relationship and the lack of information transparency and public awareness. These defects have made the NHI prone to abuses and exploitation. And gradually, the healthcare in Taiwan is becoming a purely profit-driven enterprise.
Our goal is to promote healthcare reform in Taiwan through advocacies backed up by careful observation and analysis. And we hope our actions could raise awareness among the government, healthcare providers, and the public.
THRF welcomes support from anyone who share our vision; together we can work together to improve the healthcare future in Taiwan.
Our Mission is to promote a high quality, fair, and just healthcare system in Taiwan.
Here are our goals:
i. Push for a transparent, accountable healthcare system
ii. Promote healthcare safety and patient’s rights
iii. Encourage the public to participate the healthcare reform.
iv. Advocate for the fair and just distribution of healthcare resources
v. Against the overtly profit driven healthcare: While we agrees that all business, includes healthcare, needs to make profit, we believe profit making should not take precedence over the healthcare quality or patient’s safety.
vi. Cooperate with the public to supervise the healthcare environment
2. About Us-> What We Do
All of our advocacies would be closely adhered to our principles. THRF is a
non-governmental, non-partisan,non-profit NGOs. We welcome other’s supports and participations to our efforts, as long as those helps do not come against the following principles:
Our Principles:
i. We do not accept any founds from the Department of Health (DOH), the Bureau of National Health Insurances (BNHI) or any health-related government agencies.
ii. We do not accept any designated donation from other NGOs, charity foundations, corporations, or professional associations.
iii. We will not participate in, or express opinion about non-healthcare related issues.
iv. We will not involve in non-healthcare related political activities.
Our activities and services can be divided into three main categories:
Inspection
i. We will disclose any substandard and illegal medical practice we have observed, to the public and the related authorities.
ii. We also inspect and analyze the performances of healthcare institutions and health policies through researches, interviews, and public surveys.
Advocacy
iii. We advocate the improvement of healthcare services on the issues of
1. Healthcare system transparency
2. Patients?safety and rights
3. Medical staff’s safety and rights
4. Improvement of the healthcare quality
5. Revision and reinforcement of healthcare policies
6. Fair distribution of healthcare resources
Patient and Public Empowerments
iv. We aim to empower the patients and increase the public awareness toward healthcare reforms through:
1. Providing information about medical policies and regulations
2. Teaching the patients about the things to consider and the questions to ask before taking medical treatments
3. Providing consultant services to patient who suffered from medical malpractice and dispute
4. Helping patients who suffer from medical malpractice to form self-support groups
5. Cooperate with NGOs and organizations that promote well-beings of under-privileged patients (e.g. patient with rare disease)
Our Past Achievements
2002.
1. Advocating for the information disclosure on the pharmaceutical products
- Medicine bags should be carefully labeled with basic information such as name of the medicine, aliment treated, side effects, and durations…THRF suggests an information list, which contents 16 different categories, to the Department of Health. Hopefully, publicly disclosed information would improve the drug use safety.
- The Department of Health responded and introduced regulations to address this issue at 5/28/02
2. THRF led a joint protest of 75 NGOs at August 16 2002 against rising of National Health Insurance Premium rate, urging the Bureau of National Health Insurance to investigate its managerial flaws before turning to the public for extra founds.
2003
1. Pushing for the improvement on surgery consent forms.
- Published patient safety leaflet: ?I style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">Three thoughts and eight questions before the operation?o:p>
- The Department of Health announced new standard for the operation consent forms at 8/12/03. The consent form would now be a required to give to patients or patient’s family before any operation in order to protect both patients and healthcares?rights.
2. Conducting a survey on the labeling of the drug bags around Taiwan
- Hosting event: “Drug bag lottery? and through this event collecting sample of drug bags from different area of Taiwan. The result of the survey showed over 95% of drug bags was not clearly labeled.
- Pushing for the drug bag reform
- At 04/23/04, the DOH began to establish “drug bag database?in order to provide standard drug information for local clinics and pharmacies.
2004
1. THRF reasserted the patient’s right to access personal medical records without any unreasonable hindrance.
- Comparing medical record accessibility in Taiwan with U.S.A., U.K., Australia and New Zealand. The results showed Taiwan’s medical record accessibility was lowest and most cumbersome among the country in the list.
- At 6/28/04, the DOH demanded all health facility must hand over medical record upon patient’s request within 14 days.
2. THRF urged the DOH take steps to supervise and disclose the hospitals?audit reports.
- The DOH promise to disclose audit reports of all registered Non-for-profit hospitals by 12/31/04. It also guaranteed to reform current NHI contracting system, which would help to improve the financial transparency of hospitals.
3. THRF hosted press conference denouncing the under table negotiation between political representatives and hospital managements on the issue of hospital audit discourse. We believed that the lack of transparency in government’s decision making process was hurting the healthcare reform.
- The Legislative Yuan should enforce the Legislators' Conduct Act (立法委員行為法), and standardize the lobbying practices on the healthcare-related policy.
- The negotiating processes of healthcare policies should be visible to the public, so the participants could be held accountable for their decisions.
- Both DOH and BNHI should publicize its decision making process and meeting records on the regular base.
2005
- Follow up on the improvement of surgery consent forms.
- Hosting event: “Consent Forms Lottery? and through the event collecting samples of surgery consent forms issued after 2003 around Taiwan. The result showed around 70% of the consent form and 86% of pre-surgical briefings still fell behind the DOH’s new 2003 standard.
- Begin at January 2006, the DOH required all hospital submit copy of surgery consent form signed by the patient after each operation. Operation without surgery consent form submitted would not be reimbursed by the NHI FFS service payment system.
2006
- Monitoring the NHI reform
- Pushing for the pediatric drug improvement.
- Taiwan Health Reform Foundation and 10 other NGOs and unions protested against DOH’s attempt to lower the minimum staff requirements during the revision of the Health Act.
- Advocating against obscure medical recipes. Clear recipe could help the patient avoid unnecessary charges.
- Advocating for the improvement and standardization of the medical prescriptions. The advocacy was aim to increase of medical information transparency and public accessibilities.
- Denouncing the excessive profit-driven practices by the corporate-owned not-for-profit hospitals. The hospital management should not expand the commercial section inside the hospital so to lure outside population to shop inside.
- Conducting a follow-up survey on the medical record accessibility from 437 hospitals. The result of the survey showed that nearly 70% of hospitals still require doctor’s approval for the medical record, while most of the patients still need to endure long register process before accessing their own medical record.
3. About Us -> How We Work
The Taiwan Health Reform Foundation expresses our advocacy through public seminars, press conferences and publications. The following is an example of how THRF develop its advocacy:
i. THRF will identify the potential health-related issues through
1. Our own observations and surveys
2. Public complaints
3. News mediums
4. Academic reports
ii. Our project specialist team would research the issue to verify its validity, urgency and damages.
iii. Our chair committees would meet monthly to set up project schedules, strategies, timeline and goals.
iv. Data collection and further researches
v. Presentation method:
1. Press releases (via online, or paper)
2. Press conference
3. Discussion with the responsible government agencies
vi. Monitoring the follow-up social and governmental responses or activities.
vii. Summarize the issue into our periodicals/publication.
4. About Us -> Who We Are -> Organization Structure:
Chair Committee
[董事會]
↓
Chairwoman
[董事長]
↓
Vice Executive Director ←Executive Director → Vice Executive Director
[執行長]
↓
General Director
[辦公室主任]
↓
Office Sections
[辦公室小組]
Office Teams
1. Research and Development Team:
Researches issues about the NHI reform, drug safety, medical information transparency, patient-doctor relationship, health surveys, and healthcare for rare disease and under-privileged.
2. Promotion and Public Education Team:
Website, publications and public education
3. Public Team:
P.R., event planning, and fund raisin.
4. Administration Team:
Office and fiscal managements.
5. About Us -> Who We Are -> Members of Chair Committee
Chairperson
Ly-Yun Chang, Ph.D. [張苙雲]
Institute of Sociology, Academia Sinica
Research Staff
Executive Director
Mei-Chun Liu, Ph.D. [劉梅君]
Institute of Labor Study, National Chengchi University
Professor
Chair Committee Members
Ming-Jen Yang, M.D., Sc.D. [楊明仁]
Department of Psychiatry, College of Medicine, National Cheng Kung University
Associate Professor & Director
Jun-Ying Huang, Ph.D. [黃俊英]
I-Shou University
Vice President
Chih-Liang Yaung, M.D. [楊志良]
Chi Mei Hospital, Liouying
Chief Executive Director
Kin-Yuan Lin, Ph.D. [林金源]
Bai-Rei Education and Life-Long Learning Foundation [百略學習教育基金會]
Chairperson
Ke-Ming Yao, Ph.D. [姚克明]
School of Public Health, National Defense Medical Center
Professor (Retired)
Yu-Jung Weng, Ph.D. [翁玉榮]
Law Department, Central Police University
Professor
Min-Chieh Tseng, Ph.D. [曾敏傑]
Department of Social Works, National Taipei University
Associate Professor
Honor Chairs
Chai-Sung Lin [柴松林]
Chinese Association for Human Rights
Director-General (Retired)
Kun-Yen Huang, Ph.D. [黃昆巖]
National Health Research Institutes
Research Staff
Eng-Kung Yeh, M.D. [葉英堃]
Taipei Medical University / Department of Health
Honor Professor / Adviser
Kwang-Juei Lo, M.D. [羅光瑞]
Taipei Veterans General Hospitals
Honor Adviser
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