• Journal of Convergence for Information Technology
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• v.9 no.4
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• pp.1-7
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• 2019

The medical environment, combined with IT technology, is changing the paradigm for medical services from treatment to prevention. In particular, as ICT convergence digital healthcare technology is applied to hospital medical systems, infrastructure technologies such as big data, Internet of Things, and artificial intelligence are being used in conjunction with the cloud. In particular, as medical services are used with IT devices, the quality of medical services is increasingly improving to make them easier for users to access. Medical institutions seeking to incorporate IoT services into cloud health care environment services are trying to reduce hospital operating costs and improve service quality, but have not yet been fully supported. In this paper, a patient information collection model from hospital IoT system, which has established a cloud environment, is proposed. The proposed model prevents third parties from illegally eavesdropping and interfering with patients' biometric information through IoT devices attached to the patient's body at hospitals in cloud environments that have established hospital IoT systems. The proposed model allows clinicians to analyze patients' disease information so that they can collect and treat diseases associated with their eating habits through IoT devices. The analyzed disease information minimizes hospital work to facilitate the handling of prescriptions and care according to the patient's degree of illness.

• Journal of Korean Academy of Nursing
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• v.51 no.5
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• pp.585-596
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• 2021

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to explore nurses' experience with caring for COVID-19 patients in a negative pressure room amid the spread of the pandemic. Methods: This study was a qualitative research, and focus group interviews were used to collect data. Three focus groups comprising 19 nurses were interviewed from February 17 to 25, 2021. All interviews were recorded and transcribed verbatim with the consent of the participants. The verbatim transcripts were scrutinized using thematic analysis. Results: Two main themes emerged from the analysis: 'Struggling in an isolated space' and 'Limitations of nursing infrastructure and system'. The nurses caring for COVID-19 patients experienced anxiety and fear about the infection, physical exhaustion, emotional burnout, and a sense of duty as a nurse. They also acknowledged the lack of guidelines, increased task and burden, limitations of nursing care, and the demand for improving the limitations of the nursing system. Conclusion: The results of this study demonstrate that nurses caring for COVID-19 patients encounter physical and emotional problems within the limited healthcare system. The study suggests that comprehensive interventions are needed for nurses. Furthermore, detailed guidelines, strengthening of nursing personnel, and improvements to the nursing system are vital to effectively cope with the pandemic. The government and medical institutions should be aware of the needs of nurses and what they are going through, and make efforts to improve the quality of life of healthcare workers and create a safe healthcare environment.

• Journal of Environmental Health Sciences
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• v.46 no.4
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• pp.359-367
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• 2020

Objectives: Exposure to mold is strongly associated with adverse health effects (development or exacerbation of allergic diseases). We reviewed the health effects of mold exposure and explored to determine the annual distribution of indoor mold in facilities with susceptible populations. Methods: The health effects of mold exposure were mainly summarized by reviewing related papers and WHO research reports. We selected 10 facilities, including daycare centers, postpartum care centers, medical institutions, and elderly care facilities within the Seoul Metropolitan. Mold sampling was performed once every week or once every quarter from February 2016 to 2017. In addition, fungal species analyses was performed, and distribution status by month and facility was analyzed in the same manner as concentration. Results: Adverse health effects attributed to fungal exposure are largely divided into allergic symptoms, toxic effects, and infectious effects. Monthly mean concentrations of mold indoors and outdoors was 368.8 CFU/㎥ (geometric mean 213.4 CFU/㎥) and 496.0 CFU/㎥ (327.9 CFU/㎥), respectively. The indoor concentration has begun to increase in February, peaked in July, declined in August, increased again until October, and then decreased in November. About 36 genera of indoor fungal species were found in each facility. Cladosporium sp., Penicillium sp., Fusarium sp., Aspergillus sp., Alternaria sp., and Arthrinium sp. were observed as the dominant species. Conclusions: Our findings showed that the overall level of indoor mold was below the 500 CFU/㎥ level recommended by the Ministry of Environment. The development of DNA-based assessment and expanding facilities to be monitored for mold would be necessary for preventive aspects.

• Journal of The Korea Institute of Healthcare Architecture
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• v.24 no.3
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• pp.49-57
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• 2018

Purpose: The increase in patients requiring hemodialysis has resulted in an increase dialysis-associated infections risk. but there are no Renal Dialysis unit design standard meet specified safety and quality standards. Therefore, appropriate Establish standards and legal regulation is important for the provision of initial certification and maintenance of facility, equipment, and human resource quality. Methods: Literature survey on the design guideline and standards of Renal Dialysis unit design in Korea, U.S, Germany, Singapore, Hongkong, Dubai. Results: There are no established standards for facilities in dialysis units in Korea. To prevent infections in dialysis patients, necessary establish standards. Considering the domestic and overseas Health-care facilities standards, the major factors to be considered in the medical environment for Renal Dialysis Unit are as follows. First, planning to separate Clean areas(treatment area) from contaminated areas(medical waste storage area). Second, ensure sufficient space and minimum separation distance. Although there may be differences depending on the circumstances of individual institutions, renal dialysis unit consider the space to prevent droplet transmission. Third, secure infrastructure of infection prevention such as sufficient amount of hand hygiene sinks. Hand washing facilities for staff within the Unit should be readily available. Hand hygiene sinks should be located to prevent water from splashing into the treatment area. Fourth, Heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) system for Renal Dialysis Unit is all about providing a safer environment for patients and staff. Implications: The results of this paper can be the basic data for the design of the Renal Dialysis Units and relevant regulations.

• Journal of the Korean association of regional geographers
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• v.3 no.2
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• pp.163-193
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• 1997

Medical services are a fundamental and essential service in all urban areas. The location and accessibility of medical service facilities and institutions are critical to the diagnosis, control and prevention of illness and disease. The purpose of this paper is to present the results of a study on the location of medical facilities in Kwangju and the utilization of these facilities by the inhabitants. The following information is a summary of the findings: (1) Korea, like many countries, is now witnessing an increase in the age of its population as a result of higher living standards and better medical services. Korea is also experiencing a rapid increase in health care costs. To ensure easy access to medical consultation, diagnosis and treatment by individuals, the hierarchical efficient location of medical facilities, low medical costs, equalized medical services, preventive medical care is important. (2) In Korea, the quality of medical services has improved significantly as evident by the increased number of medical facilities and medical personnel. However, there is still a need for not only quantitative improvements but also for a more equitable distribution of and location of medical services. (3) There are 503 medical facilities in Kwangju each with a need to service 2,556 people. This is below the national average of 1,498 inhabitants per facility. The higher locational quotient and satisfactory population per medical facility showed at the civic center. On the other hand, problem regions such as the traditional residential area in Buk-Gu, Moo-deung mountain area and the outer areas of west Kwangju still maintain rural characteristics. (4) In the study area there are 86 general medicine clinics which provide basic medical services. i. e. one clinic per every 14,949 residents. As a basic service, its higher locational quotient showed in the residential area. The lower population concentration per clinic was found in the civic center and in the former town center, Songjeong-dong. In recently build residential areas and in the civic center, the lack of general medicine clinics is not a serious medical services issue because of the surplus of medical specialists in Korea. People are inclined to seek a consultation with a specialist in specific fields rather than consult a general practitioner. As a result of this phenomenon, there are 81 internal medicine facilities. Of these, 32.1% provide services to people who are not referred by a primary care physician but who self-diagnose then choose a medical facility specializing in what they believe to be their health problem. Areas in the city, called dongs, without any internal facilities make up 50% of the total 101 dongs. (5) There are 78 surgical facilities within the area, and there is little difference at the locational appearance from internal medicine facilities. There are also 71 pediatric health clinics for people under 15 years of age in this area, represents one clinic per 5,063 people. On the quantitative aspect, this is a positive situation. Accessibility is the most important facility choice factor, so it should be evenly located in proportion to demander distribution. However, 61% of 102 dongs have no pediatric clinics because of the uneven location. (6) There are 43 obstetrical and gynecological clinics in Kwangju, and the number of residents being served per clinic is 15,063. These services need to be given regularly so it should increase the numbers. There are 37 ENT clinics in the study area with the lower concentration in Dong-gu (32.4%) making no locational differences by dong. There are 23 dermatology clinics with the largest concentration in Dong-Gu. There are 17 ophthalmic clinics concentrated in the residential area because of the primary function of this type of specialization. (7) The use of general medicine clinics, internal medicine clinics, pediatric clinics, ENT clinics by the inhabitants indicate a trend toward primary or routine medical services. Obstetrics and gynecology clinics are used on a regular basis. In choosing a general medicine clinic, internal medicine clinic, pediatric clinic, and a ENT clinic, accessibility is the key factor while choice of a general hospital, surgery clinic, or an obstetrics and gynecology clinic, thes faith and trust in the medical practitioner is the priority consideration. (8) I considered the efficient use of medical facilities in the aspect of locational and management and suggest the following: First, primary care facilities should be evenly distributed in every area. In Kwangju, the number of medical facilities is the lowest among the six largest cities in Korea. Moreover, they are concentrated in Dong-gu and in newly developed areas. The desired number of medical facilities should be within 30 minutes of each person's home. For regional development there is a need to develop a plan to balance, for example, taxes and funds supporting personnel, equipment and facilities. Secondly, medical services should be co-ordinated to ensure consistent, appropriate, quality services. Primary medical facilities should take charge of out-patient activities, and every effort should be made to standardize and equalize equipment and facility resources and to ensure ongoing development and training in the primary services field. A few specialty medical facilities and general hospitals should establish a priority service for incurable and terminally ill patients. (9) The management scheme for the inhabitants' efficient use of medical service is as follows: The first task is to efficiently manage medical facilities and related services. Higher quality of medical services can be accomplished within the rapidly changing medical environment. A network of social, administrative and medical organizations within an area should be established to promote information gathering and sharing strategies to better assist the community. Statistics and trends on the rate or occurrence of diseases, births, deaths, medical and environment conditions of the poor or estranged people should be maintained and monitored. The second task is to increase resources in the area of disease prevention and health promotion. Currently the focus is on the treatment and care of individuals with illness or disease. A strong emphasis should also be placed on promoting prevention of illness and injury within the community through not only public health offices but also via medical service facilities. Home medical care should be established and medical testing centers should be located as an ordinary service level. Also, reduced medical costs for the physically handicapped, cardiac patients, and mentally ill or handicapped patients should be considered.

• Journal of Home Health Care Nursing
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• v.30 no.1
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• pp.5-14
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• 2023

Purpose: This study aims to identify the degree of anxiety and depression related to infection control and job stress in clinical nurses during the COVID-19 pandemic. Furthermore, it seeks to identify the effects of depression. Finally, it intends to develop intervention measures to prevent depression in clinical nurses during epidemics of new infectious diseases and prepare basic data for developing educational programs. Methods: Data were collected using a self-report questionnaire survey administered to 208 nurses. The data were analyzed using the IBM SPSS (Version 26.0) statistics program. Results: The correlation analysis between participant depression, anxiety, and infection control job stress found that depression had a positive correlation with anxiety (r=.63, p<.001) and infection control work stress (r=.26, p<.001). Anxiety (β=0.60, p<.001) was found to significantly affect participant depression with an explanatory power of 40.2%, confirming that higher anxiety levels induce increased depression. Conclusion: Based on the above results, anxiety is confirmed to be a factor that affects depression. Accordingly, education is required to strengthen individuals' physical and mental capabilities and promote a safe working environment, including providing sufficient personal protective devices and other appropriate gear to defend clinical nurses against outbreaks of emerging infectious diseases at medical institutions and through healthcare policies. Other considerations should include sufficient rest hours and paying additional benefits for nurses caring for patients with severe confirmed COVID-19.

• The Korean Society of Law and Medicine
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• v.11 no.2
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• pp.181-208
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• 2010

Maternity services is often perceived as a troublesome business and obstetric litigation is on the increase in Western countries. Overall, the number of claim and cost of litigation to the NHS Litigation Authority (NHSLA) from maternity services in the UK is increasing every year. Maternity services account for 60-70% of the total sum paid. This has widespread implications for both the individual practitioners and the institutions where they work, due to increasing malpractice insurance premiums. Fear of litigation is also attracting fewer medical graduates into the specialty, leading to a recruitment crisis in obstetrics and gynaecology. The litigation process can cause pain, suffering and distress to clinicians as well as to the patients and their families. Litigation in maternity services is the result of a complex of events when malpractice (presumed or real) impacts on the attitude of pregnant women and their environment. In such complexity, information is mandatory but may often be misinterpreted. If messages are not tailored to the receiver's capacity, communicating well with the pregnant patient becomes crucial. Therefore, to reduce medicallegal issues in obstetrics, increasing attention and an applicable standard of obstetric care to avoid negligence and medical errors should go along with other measures. Considering UK's experiences, NHS redress scheme make it easier to pursue small claims and birth related claims, without necessarily reducing the number of claims processed through the conventional legal system and perhaps encouraging even more of them. The task of dealing with the greater number of inquiries into their practice would inevitably create an added burden for clinicians and hospital managers. Thus further proposals are required to limit the cost of processing inflated claims and to consider whether clinicians should be given some protection from litigation alleging a failure to prevent birth related impairment.

• Journal of the korean academy of Pediatric Dentistry
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• v.39 no.2
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• pp.206-225
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• 2012

General status of pediatric dentistry in Korea is to conduct vigorous academic activities and specialized medical care centering the Korean Association of Pediatric Dentistry (KAPD) that has about 1,000 pediatric dentists as members, pediatric dentistry departments of 11 Colleges of Dentistry, numbers of pediatric dentistry training institutions and private clinics specialized in children. From 1996, the accredited pediatric dentists were produced by the KAPD and from 2008, the state began to produce the accredited pediatric dentists. Since then, doctors with expertise in pediatric care had opened private clinics in addition to the university hospitals, it became the basis of a momentum to deepen the specialty of pediatric dentistry. The Dentistry community of Korea is going through rapid and profound changes recently, and the underlying reasons for such changes can be classified largely into a few categories: (1) Decreasing population and structural changes in population (2) Increase in numbers of dentists, (3) Changes in the pattern of dental diseases and (4) Changes in medical environment. In Korea, the children population in the age range of 0 ~ 14 years old had been decreased by 2 million in 2010 compared to that of 2000 due to reduction of birth rate. The current population of children in the age range of 0 ~ 4 years old in 2010 takes up 16.2% of the total population, but it is estimated that such percentage would decrease to 8.0% by 2050. Such percentage is largely behind the estimated mean global population of 19.6% by 2050. On the other hand, the number of dentists had been largely increased from 18,000 in 2000 to 25,000 in 2010. And it is estimated that the number will be increased to 41,000 by 2030. In addition, the specialized personnel of Pediatric dentistry had been shown as increased by 2.5 times during past 10 years. For the changes in the pattern of dental diseases, including dental caries, each df rate of 5 years old children and 12 years old children had been decreased by 21.9% and 16.7% respectively in 2010 compared to 2000. Each df Index also had been decreased by 2.5 teeth and 1.2 teeth respectively. The medical expenditure of Korea is less than that of OECD and more specifically, the expenditure from the National Health Plan is less than OECD but the expenditure covered by households is larger than OECD. These facts indicate that it is considered as requiring the coverage of the national health plan to be reinforced more in the future and as such reinforcement needs continuous promotion. In medical examination pattern of Pediatric dentistry, the preventive and corrective treatment were increased whereas the restorative treatment was decreased. It is considered that such change is caused from decrease of dental caries from activation of the prevention project at national level. For the restorative treatment, the restorations in use of dental amalgam, pre-existing gold crowning and endodontic treatment had been decreased in their proportion while the restorative treatment in use of composite resin had been increased. It is considered that such changes is caused by the change of demands from patients and family or guardians as they desired more aesthetic improvement along with socio-economic growth of Korean society. Due to such changes in dentistry, the pediatric dentistry in Korea also attempts to have changes in the patterns of medical examination as follows; It tends to implement early stage treatment through early diagnosis utilizing various diagnostic tools such as FOTI or QLF. The early stage dental caries so called white spot had been included in the subjects for dental care or management and in order to do so, the medical care guidelines essentially accompanied with remineralization treatment as well as minimally invasive treatment is being generalized gradually. Also, centering the Pediatric dentists, the importance of caries risk assessment is being recognized, in addition that the management of dental caries is being changed from surgical approach to internal medicinal approach. Recently, efforts began to emerge in order to increase the target patients to be managed by dentists and to expand the application scope of Pediatric dentistry along with through such changes. The interest and activities of Pediatric dentists which had been limited to the medical examination room so far, is now being expanded externally, as they put efforts for participating in the preventive policy making process of the community or the state, and to support the political theories. And also opinions are being collected into the direction that the future- oriented strategic political tasks shall be selected and researches as well as presentations on the theoretical rationale of such tasks at the association level.

• Journal of radiological science and technology
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• v.31 no.1
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• pp.1-10
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• 2008

Ubiquitous health care system, which is one of the developing solution technologies of IT, BT and NT, could give us new medical environments in future. Implementing health information systems can be complex, expensive and frustrating. Healthcare professionals seeking to acquire or upgrade systems do not have a convenient, reliable way of specifying a level of adherence to communication standards sufficient to achieve truly efficient interoperability. Great progress has been made in establishing such standards-DICOM, IHE and HL7, notably, are now highly advanced. IHE has defined a common framework to deliver the basic interoperability needed for local and regional health information networks. It has developed a foundational set of standards-based integration profiles for information exchange with three interrelated efforts. HL7 is one of several ANSI-accredited Standards Developing Organizations operating in the healthcare arena. Most SDOs produce standards (protocols) for a particular healthcare domain such as pharmacy, medical devices, imaging or insurance transactions. HL7's domain is clinical and administrative data. HL7 is an international community of healthcare subject matter experts and information scientists collaborating to create standards for the exchange, management and integration of electronic healthcare information. The ASTM specification for Continuity of Care Record was developed by subcommittee E31.28 on electronic health records, which includes clinicians, provider institutions, administrators, patient advocates, vendors, and health industry. In this paper, there are suggestions that provide a test bed, demonstration and specification of how standards such a IHE, HL7, ASTM can be used to provide an integrated environment.

• Journal of the Korea Organic Resources Recycling Association
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• v.31 no.4
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• pp.29-39
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• 2023

In this study, an analysis of medical waste generation characteristics was conducted, differentiating between ordinary situation and the outbreaks of massive infectious diseases. During ordinary situation, prediction models for medical waste quantities by type, general medical waste(G-MW), hazardous medical waste(H-MW), infectious medical waste(I-MW), were established through regression analysis, with all significance values (p) being <0.0001, indicating statistical significance. The determination coefficient(R2) values for prediction models of each category were analyzed as follows : I-MW(R2=0.9943) > G-MW(R2=0.9817) > H-MW(R2=0.9310). Additionally, factors such as GDP(G-MW), the number of medical institutions (H-MW), and the elderly population ratio(I-MW), utilized as influencing factors and consistent with previous literature, showed high correlations. The total MW generation, evaluated by combining each model, had an MAE of 2,615 and RMSE of 3,353. This indicated accuracy levels similar to the medical waste models of H-MW(2,491, 2,890) and I-MW(2,291, 3,267). Due to limitations in accurately estimating the quantity of medical waste during the rapid and outbreaks of massive infectious diseases, the generation unit of I-MW was derived to analyze its characteristics. During the early unstable stage of infectious disease outbreaks, the generation unit was 8.74 kg/capita·day, 2.69 kg/capita·day during the stable stage, and an average of 0.08 kg/capita·day during the reduction stage. Correlation analysis between generation unit of I-MW and lethality rates showed +0.99 in the unstable stage, +0.52 in the stable stage, and +0.96 in the reduction period, demonstrating a very high positive correlation of +0.95 or higher throughout the entire outbreaks of massive infectious diseases. The results derived from this study are expected to play a useful role in establishing an effective medical waste management system in the field of health care.