Hospitals in Kaohsiung

Kaohsiung is the best-equipped city in southern Taiwan for anyone who falls ill, and by a distance. The Kaohsiung and Pingtung region has four hospitals holding the Ministry of Health and Welfare’s top “medical centre” grade, and three of them are on this page: the teaching hospital of Kaohsiung Medical University in Sanmin, the Veterans General Hospital out at Zuoying, and Chang Gung at Niaosong, which at around 3,000 beds is the largest hospital in the south. Nobody needs to be moved to Taipei for something serious.

This page lists all three with the practical detail: what kind of hospital it is, roughly how big, where it is, how to call it and how to find it on a map. Every name opens a full page on that hospital. Details were checked against each hospital’s own website in September 2026; switchboards do change, so if a number fails, call 119.

The 3 at a glance

Bed counts are approximate. Tap a name for the full page.

The hospitals

Which hospital should I go to?

For anything that happens in the middle of the city — around Kaohsiung Main Station, the Liuhe night market or Formosa Boulevard — Kaohsiung Medical University Chung-Ho Memorial Hospital is the closest big hospital and the easiest to reach, one MRT stop north of the main station. If you are staying up at Lotus Pond, or you have just come off the high speed rail at Zuoying, Kaohsiung Veterans General Hospital is minutes away and is the only public medical centre in the region. For something serious or complicated, Kaohsiung Chang Gung Memorial Hospital is the largest and deepest-staffed hospital in southern Taiwan, though it sits out at Niaosong with no MRT. In a genuine emergency, go to the nearest of the three or call 119 and let the crew choose.

What will it cost?

Less than you fear. A visitor is not covered by the national health insurance that residents use and pays the full self-pay price, but that price is set inside a system built to be cheap: an emergency-room visit with tests commonly lands in the low thousands of New Taiwan dollars rather than the tens of thousands the same visit costs in Japan. The three hospitals here are close to one another on price — the Veterans General is the cheapest, Chang Gung and the university hospital a little above it — and the gap between them matters far less than the gap between Taiwan and wherever you flew in from. Ask for a written estimate before any procedure, and keep every receipt.

Insurance, deposits and paperwork

Almost every traveller pays and claims. Direct billing to a foreign insurer is uncommon in Taiwan and generally has to be arranged in advance through a hospital’s international medical service, which is not something you can set up at two in the morning with a broken wrist. Take your passport; you will need it to register. If you are admitted, expect to leave a deposit. The one instruction worth memorising: before you leave the hospital, ask for an itemised receipt and an English-language diagnosis certificate. Hospitals issue these routinely for a small fee, but you must ask, and chasing one from another country afterwards is genuinely difficult.

Getting there and ambulances

The national ambulance number is 119. It is free, it is answered around the clock, and the crew take you to the hospital they judge appropriate rather than the one you name. Kaohsiung’s red MRT line does most of the work for visitors: it runs from the airport through the city centre and up to Zuoying, passing near two of the three hospitals here. Taxis are plentiful and cheap by Western standards, and are the sensible choice with an injury or luggage. Chang Gung is the exception to all of it — no line reaches Niaosong, so it is a taxi or a bus, about half an hour from the centre.

Walking into an emergency room

This is the part that surprises people who have just come from Japan. A Taiwanese emergency department takes walk-in patients: no referral letter from a clinic, no surcharge for arriving without one. You go to the registration counter first, hand over your passport, and pay or are billed a registration fee; a nurse then triages you on a five-level scale, and you are seen in order of how ill you are rather than when you arrived. Payment for the visit itself is settled at the cashier on the way out. Use a hospital’s international medical service centre instead when the problem can wait — those centres keep weekday office hours and are built for planned care in English, not for the middle of the night.

Pharmacies

Taiwanese hospitals dispense their own prescriptions from a counter in the same building, so a consultation and the medicine that follows it are one trip and one queue. For everything smaller there are chain pharmacies — Watsons and Cosmed in every shopping street, plus the neighbourhood health-insurance pharmacies, which have a qualified pharmacist behind the counter. Do not expect Thailand’s pharmacy culture, though: prescription-only medicines really are prescription-only here, and antibiotics are not sold over the counter. For a cold, a cut or an upset stomach, a small local clinic is faster and cheaper than any of the three hospitals on this page, and Kaohsiung has a great many of them.

Kaohsiung travel guide / Kaohsiung tourist map / Taiwan visa guide / Taiwan destinations / Hospitals in Taiwan / Hospitals in Taiwan / All hospitals

Travel information, not medical advice.

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