Page 33 - TAIWAN TOBACCO CONTROL ANNUAL REPORT 2019

A healthy hospital certification with 7 standards and 38 articles has been developed in line with the new assessment standards of the WHO International Network of Health Promoting Hospitals and Health Services to provide more suitable health promotion models for local hospitals by incorporating unique characteristics of the Taiwanese healthcare environment such as friendly environments, smoke-free concepts, and energy conservation and carbon reduction. By 2018, a total of 184 organizations had passed this certification. The goal is to implement service concepts characterized by environmental, employee, and patient health and develop a healthy hospital certification mechanism for Taiwan. GNTH Gold Forum Awards for Tobacco-Free Health Care Services The GNTH Network for Tobacco Free Health Care Services aims to act as an international platform for sharing, learning, and promoting the concepts of tobacco-free hospitals and thus organizes the "GNTH Gold Forum". Countries around the world would submit candidate hospitals that have met gold level award qualification requirements and have unique characteristics for the international assessment. Intensive global competition and evidencebased assessment of tobacco- free hospital best practice were carried out to select hospitals that deserve the Gold-Level Award that could serve as the benchmark for the learning of others. Since the GNTH started to offer the International Gold-Level Awards in 2009, only 50 hospitals throughout the world managed to acquire this prestigious certification. Since Taiwan began recommending tobacco-free hospitals to apply for the International Gold-Level Award in 2012, there have been 18 hospitals receiving the honor, making Taiwan the network with the greatest number of Gold-Level hospitals in 2018. Integration with second generation cessation services payment scheme for greater performance The HPA of the Ministry of Health and Welfare launched the "Second Generation Cessation Services Payment Scheme" on March 1st, 2012. Since medical institutions provide more diverse, costeffective, and convenient smoking cessation service, the tobacco-free hospitals adopt the 8 standards of GNTH, and utilize the established model to initiate effective actions against smoking. For example, in the 4th standard of the GNTH, every patient is asked whether they are a smoker or not, and smokers are persuaded to cease tobacco use. Seventy percent of hospitals in Taiwan providing smoking cessation services, among these hospitals, 60% of them are accredited as "tobacco-free hospitals"(or healthy hospitals), and 40% of them are "not accredited as-tobacco- free hospitals"(or healthy hospitals). The data of smoking cessation services shown: in 2018, the cessation service volume of the tobacco-free or healthly hospitals (68,438 people) is 24.8 times greater than the other hospitals (2,755 people), Almost 49 times more hospitalized patients (23,379) in tobacco-free (or healthy) hospitals receive smoking cessation services than that in the other 31 Reducing the Demand for Tobacco