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Meng-Chih Lee

Publications and source records attributed to Meng-Chih Lee.

4 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2002

High-frequency death certifiers in Taiwan: a sociocultural product.

Accurate death certification is essential to high-quality mortality statistics. Physicians who certify disproportionately large numbers of deaths can significantly affect the validity of the resultant mortality data. In Taiwan in 1994, 110 death certifiers issued more than 100 death certificates each; and nine of these high-frequency certifiers issued more than 500 death certificates. We explore the cultural, political, economic, historical, and social contexts of high-frequency death certification in Taiwan. Because of the traditional belief in Taiwan that one must die at home for the soul to be incorporated into the collective ancestral tablet of the household, many families bring their loved ones home from the hospital just before death. Hospital physicians cannot legally issue a death certificate in these cases because they did not witness the dying process. Although the government introduced an administrative certification system to handle these outside-hospital deaths, the great demands of this system have attracted many 'special exam' doctors (doctors with no formal medical degree) to adopt death certification as a full-time business. In this context, it is not surprising that 'routinization' of death certification (J. Health Soc. Behav. 32 (1991) 273) has led to low-quality reporting among these certifiers. We argue that attempts to improve the quality of mortality statistics should take into account the unique sociocultural contexts of different countries.

Attitude to Death↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Characteristics of hospitalizations among adolescents in Taiwan: population-based data.

To understand the adolescent health status in Taiwan, we collected hospitalization data of Taiwanese adolescents in 1997 under the execution of National Health Insurance (NHI). Then 5% of the data was selected with systematic sampling method by National Health Research Institute (NHRI) and was categorized according to age, gender, disease pattern and specialty. The results showed there were totally 160, 120 adolescent admissions in 1997, about 6.81% of total population admissions. There were more female than male admissions and more late adolescent than early adolescent admissions. In clinical disorders, injury was the leading cause of hospitalization for male adolescent and female early adolescent admissions. Delivery was the leading cause of hospitalization for female late adolescent admissions. The most common specialty admissions among early adolescents were for pediatrics, followed by surgery, and then general medicine. Among late adolescents, the most common specialty admissions were for surgery, followed by obstetrics and gynecology, and then general medicine. In conclusion, the most common reasons of adolescence hospitalization were related to behavioral factors rather than disease processes, and adolescent admissions by specialty were mostly non-professional.

Adolescent↗