| dc.description.abstract | The attempt of the present thesis is to discuss the connection between the medical business of the Tzu Chi Foundation and the development of social work in Taiwan from 1972 to 2003, by which I mean to comment on the position of Hualien Tzu Chi General Hospital (HTCGH) in Hualien and Taitung’s medical history.
The Tzu Chi Foundation was started as Buddhist Compassion Relief Tzu Chi Merit Society (aka Buddhist Compassion Relief Tzu Chi Association) in the 1950s when the United States gradually decreased its financial aid in Taiwan, which caused the ROC government to earmark most its budget for national defense rather than the welfare for disadvantaged groups, and such destitution of wellbeing is even worse in eastern Taiwan. Realizing this, Tzu Chi began its social services and quickly discovered the consequential relationship between poverty and illness. For this reason, Tzu Chi opened up its free clinics and planned for a modernized high-quality hospital while free clinics are functionally limited and insufficient to deal with acute or serious illnesses.
In the years of economic shortage, it is even more difficult for Tzu Chi to collect funds and purchase lands for the hospital in Hualien County that was less economical developed, but the difficulties were finally overcame through fundraising, charity sale and media coverage. The HTCGH has gone through a long way to become a hospital of considerable scale. It has developed its unique organizational culture to fit in hospital quality evaluations by evolving organizational structure, expanding medical facilities, and recruiting and training its employees. Now, it is the only medical center standing in the east coast of Taiwan.
After the HTCGH was founded, Tzu Chi has added frequent clinic tours to its original medical model. At the mean time, social services of different levels, including the establishment of Tzu Chi International Medical Association (TIMA) that carries out the HTCGH’s mission of humanitarian medical care in its social work, were derived from Tzu Chi’s integration of social and medical works. With the Buddhist ideal of compassion and relief, Tzu Chi unites numerous medical resources and develops comprehensive social works to globalize its medical services. Moreover, Tzu Chi practices the Buddhist vow of saving lives through the medical science of charity starting from bone marrow donation and body donation, by which its medical business is also endowed with multi-dimentional developments.
This research centers on the development of the HTCGH. By probing into the history from the emergence of Tzu Chi’s free clinic to the founding of HTCGH, a further realization of values and meanings of various facets of Tzu Chi’s social services may be brought out. As Tzu Chi incarnates the Buddhist spirit of kindness, compassion, joy, and giving into the material existence of medical facilities, its achievement from building up major medical networks in eastern Taiwan to transnational humanitarian aids that transcend the barrier of race exactly proves the indispensability of HTCGH in Taiwan’s medical history.
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