In recent years, caring capacity provided by family members has been weekened due to the demographic and social changes such as aging of the population and the growing predominance of nuclear families. In Taiwan, it is a custom that hospitalized patients have to be accompanied by their family members during their stay in hospital. In the situation that the family cannot provide accompany and care to their sick member during his or her stay in hospital, a personal aide (PA) temporarily hired by the family become an important substitute to carry out care work in hospital. Under pressure of cost control of nursing staff costs in many hospitals of Taiwan, PAs－as an important group of outsourced workers, mostly women－are also considered by hospital management as complements of the manpower and a means to reduce nursing cost of the organization. Most PAs work in hospitals, where they often expose to various health risks. However, because most PAs are outsourced workers and work without fixed employers, hospitals’ occupational health and safety provisions for their staff are often not equally applied. PAs’ work conditions and safety and health status might impact greatly on quality of care, but the society has paid little attention to these issues. In this study, we aimed to investigate work conditions and occupational health problems among female hospital PAs, and to understand the factors underlying the social production of PA’s work conditions as well as safety and health problems, including the government’s health care policies, labor legislations, power relationships at worksite, and hospitals’ management policies. In this study, multiple qualitative methods were adopted, including policy analysis, participant observation in health worker training places, and in-depth interviews with 19 PAs and 12 managing staffs, including 5 head nurses, 5 managers from brokering companys, and 2 union leaders. Study results are divided into four parts. In part one, I discussed how these women’s job choices were restricted by traditional social roles of women as care provides, and by discrimination against middle-aged and eldly women from labor market. Due to their relatively disadvantaged socioeconomic status, PA becomes one of their limited job choices in labor market. In part two, I revealed how PAs’ work was closely supervised by multiple players, including the patients, their families, nurses, and managers from brokering companies. Besides, they had to compete for work with undocumented foreign workers. Most of the female PAs were disadvantaged in power structure of worksite and often felt deeply powerless at work. In part three, I explored how PAs’ marginal status was reinforced by organizational policies, government policies on health care, and labor-related policies. The work of PA was regulated by policies from multiple sectors, but their role in hospital remained ambiguous. Many hospitals took advantage of such an ambiguous labor force and treated PAs as as a means to share nurses’ workloads and reduce personnel cost. In part four, I explained how PAs’ work and health conditions were formed in a social milieu. Because PAs were not covered by the Labor Standard Act, they lacked basic labor protections, such as long working hours, no regular times of rest, and separation from family and social life were commonly cited. Being flexibly employed and lacking in collective power, these PAs had difficulties in resisting unsafe work conditions and were highly individualized and burdened with high risks of musculoskeletal discomforts, infectious diseases, and psychological distress from interpersonal conflicts. Findings of this research highlight the disadvantageous work and health conditions among this group of workers. Structural controlling mechanisms restrict their collective power to fight for their rights to work. Health policies and regulations should not unilaterally request these health care workers to provide high quality of care without any support; policy makers should address occupational health issues of PAs, not only to protect their work and health rights, but also to safeguard the quality of health care.