• Journal of Korean Society of Occupational and Environmental Hygiene
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• v.31 no.4
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• pp.317-330
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• 2021

Objectives: By law, companies in Korea must periodically measure workers' exposure to harmful chemicals (the system is called the Work Environment Monitoring Program (WMP)[a]) and report the results to the government. The government also measures exposure to monitor the WMP's reliability (called Reliability Assessment (RA) for WMP[b]). The issue is that measured data from these two sources are so different that the objectivity of WMP needs to be confirmed by comparing the results using the European Centre for Ecotoxicology and Toxicology of Chemicals' Targeted Risk Assessment (ECETOC TRA). Methods: Step 1: Data collection from WMP reports submitted by companies (n=586) and RA for WMP written by the government (n=33). Step 2: Data Standardization by key information included. Step 3: Data conversion to input-variables required to run the ECETOC TRA model, and run the model with specific data (n=514) which meet the predetermined exposure scenario. Step 4: Statistical data analysis by process category (PROC) and ventilation type from each source ([A] and [B]). Step 5: Additional analysis of any unexpected results. Results: The process categories of the production and handling of Dichloromethane were classified into 12 PROCs, and ten of them were selected to run ECETOC TRA. Modeled values tended to be higher than measured values from both sources. For the measured values from WMP, RCR distribution by PROC was narrow (0.197-0.267, 95% CI) and did not have a relationship with ventilation type, which differs from the tendency of the modeling result. Meanwhile, the measured values from RA for WMP were relatively widely distributed (0.301-1.177, 95% CI) by PROC. In particular PROCs (13,19) were high enough to exceed 1. Also, they become low with better ventilation types and appear differently depending on the ventilation type, similar to the model result. Conclusions: This study revealed that ECETOC TRA might have the potential to serve as a screening tool for exposure assessment and to be used as assistive method for WMP to estimate exposure. Further empirical study is required to confirm its availability as a screening tool.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Environmental Restoration Technology
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• v.22 no.3
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• pp.15-30
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• 2019

Changpo Lake was created as a part of a land reclamation for refugee self-helping projects. It shows characteristics of a fresh water lake, and still retains the early appearance of reclamation that surrounding regions have not been developed into farm lands. Shallow wetland has formed around the lake, which provides great conditions for diverse lives, and surrounding earthiness is favorable for growth of vegetation and restoration of the ecosystem. However, as facilities of the Muan International Airport nearby Changpo Lake are expanding and barns are being constructed, artificialness is gradually increasing. Particularly, since pollution sources such as sport facilities, farm lands and barns are scattered around Changpo Lake, pollutants are flowing in constantly. Accordingly, the results for setting up management areas according to the spatial characteristics and creating natural ecological spaces near Changpo Lake, Taebongcheon stream and Hakgyecheon stream are as follows. First, the creation of a natural eco-friendly waterfront space should be promoted by securing the health of the aquatic ecosystem and restoring species and the ecosystem. In addition, a consultative body needs to be formed to lead local residents to participating in river investigation and monitoring, maintenance, and management through role sharing. Second, the basic direction of the spatial management plan is to keep the unique charm of Changpo Lake, maintain harmony with nature, create diverse waterfront areas, and secure the continuity of Changpo Lake and inflow streams. Moreover, the area should be divided into three zones such as a conservation zone, a restoration zone and a waterfront zone, and for each zone, the preservation of vegetation, the creation of ecological wetlands and restoration of the ecotone and ecological nature need to be promoted. Third, facilities and activity programs for each space of Changpo Lake should be operated for efficient management of protected areas. In order to suit the status of each space, biological habitats, water purification spaces, experiential and learning spaces, and convenience and rest spaces should be organized and designated as research, monitoring, education, and tourism areas. Accordingly, points of interest should be set up within the corresponding area. In this study, there are many parts that need to be supplemented for immediate implementation since the detailed plans and project costs for the promotion of programs by area are not calculated. Therefore, it is necessary to make detailed project plans and consider related projects such as water quality, restoration of habitats, nature learning and observation, and experience of ecological environments based on the categories such as research, monitoring, education and tourism in the future.

• Journal of Korean Society of Occupational and Environmental Hygiene
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• v.25 no.1
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• pp.58-71
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• 2015

Objectives: The aims of this study were to investigate the classification system of chemical substances in the Occupational Safety and Health Act(OSHA) and Chemical Substances Control Act(CSCA) and to compare several health indices (i.e., Time Weighted Average (TWA), Lethal Dose ($LD_{50}$), and Lethal Concentration ($LC_{50}$) of chemical substances by categories in each law. Methods: The chemicals regulated by each law were classified by the specific categories provided in the respective law; seven categories for OSHA (chemicals with OELs, chemicals prohibited from manufacturing, etc., chemicals requiring approval, chemicals kept below permissible limits, chemicals requiring workplace monitoring, chemicals requiring special management, and chemicals requiring special heath diagnosis) and five categories from the CSCA(poisonous substances, permitted substances, restricted substances, prohibited substances, and substances requiring preparation for accidents). Information on physicochemical properties, health indices including CMR characteristics, $LD_{50}$ and $LD_{50}$ were searched from the homepages of the Korean Occupational and Safety Agency and the National Institute of Environmental Research, etc. Statistical analysis was conducted for comparison between TWA and health index for each category. Results: The number of chemicals based on CAS numbers was different from the numbers of series of chemicals listed in each law because of repeat listings due to different names (e.g., glycol monoethylether vs. 2-ethoxy ethanol) and grouping of different chemicals under the same serial number(i.e., five different benzidine-related chemicals were categorized under one serial number(06-4-13) as prohibited substances under the CSCA). A total of 722 chemicals and 995 chemicals were listed at the OSHA and its sub-regulations and CSCA and its sub-regulations, respectively. Among these, 36.8% based on OSHA chemicals and 26.7% based on CSCA chemicals were regulated simultaneously through both laws. The correlation coefficients between TWA and $LC_{50}$ and between TWA and $LD_{50}$, were 0.641 and 0.506, respectively. The geometric mean values of TWA calculated by each category in both laws have no tendency according to category. The patterns of cumulative graph for TWA, $LD_{50}$, $LC_{50}$ were similar to the chemicals regulated by OHSA and CCSA, but their median values were lower for CCSA regulated chemicals than OSHA regulated chemicals. The GM of carcinogenic chemicals under the OSHA was significantly lower than non-CMR chemicals($2.21mg/m^3$ vs $5.69mg/m^3$, p=0.006), while there was no significant difference in CSCA chemicals($0.85mg/m^3$ vs $1.04mg/m^3$, p=0.448). $LC_{50}$ showed no significant difference between carcinogens, mutagens, reproductive toxic chemicals and non-CMR chemicals in both laws' regulated chemicals, while there was a difference between carcinogens and non-CMR chemicals in $LD_{50}$ of the CSCA. Conclusions: This study found that there was no specific tendency or significant difference in health indicessuch TWA, $LD_{50}$ and $LC_{50}$ in subcategories of chemicals as classified by the Ministry of Labor and Employment and the Ministry of Environment. Considering the background and the purpose of each law, collaboration for harmonization in chemical categorizing and regulation is necessary.

• Korea Journal of Hospital Management
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• v.8 no.3
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• pp.143-160
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• 2003

Due to the dramatic and situational change in medical industry, it has became very important to keep existing patients and to attract new patients by monitoring the medical consumer's expectation and various needs and ensuring the patients' satisfaction. This study regards the patients' satisfaction as the final object of medical service. So the object of this study is to provide useful data for the decision making and medical service marketing by exploring the problems generated by the cognition difference for the medical service between inpatients and outpatients, by responding for the problems and by examining the relationship between the satisfaction with the medical service and revisiting. To achieve the object of this study, literature research and empirical analysis were used. I establish the research model based on the existing service marketing and some hypotheses were chosen for the empirical analysis. As a result of empirical analysis for the five hypotheses, two hypotheses were chosen. First, there was cognition difference about accessibility and convenience between inpatient and outpatient. I guess that the satisfaction degree of inpatient is higher than the outpatient because the inpatient has the reliability for the hospital and determines the hospitalization or emergent coming to hospital. Second, the fifth hypothesis, "the satisfaction of patient will influence the revisiting." was chosen. The hypothesis is not only coincident with existing scholars and studies but also it provides the meaningful points for medical service marketing. The result shows that the parties concerned with hospital management should endeavor for the patient satisfaction in medical service, and that hospital management should be medical consumer centered. To measure the quality of medical service, the cognition differences for accessibility, convenience, physical environment, and human service were evaluated and the result shows that the cognition difference for the accessibility and convenience was outstanding. The analysis shows that there was cognition difference in the four categories among six subcategories in the human service -- the attitude of medical technologist, the attitude of doctor, the length of time for doctor's diagnosis for the patient and doctor's explanation. Therefore, I think that further study is required for the cause analysis for service categories which have cognition difference between inpatient and outpatient. I think the result will be very useful. Through this study, the relationship between patient satisfaction with the medical service and revisiting was verified. And it suggests that, to face the changing medical environment actively and to improve the quality of medical service, marketing strategy should be focused not on medical service providers but on medical service consumers and that the further studies for the medical consumer should be continued.

• The Journal of Korean Academic Society of Nursing Education
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• v.4 no.1
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• pp.66-80
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• 1998

With the opening of healthcare market, the health care environment in Korea is anticipating a drastic change. In this Internationally open market environment, it is necessary to introduce a systematic health care plan and DRG system which offer qualitative medical services as well as reduced cost. Purpose of this study is to develop and test the critical pathway for Cesarean section patient in the way to be possible the integrated inpatient management. It was adopted the process of six phases to develop the critical pathway as the theoretical framework implemented by Johns Hopkins Hospital, Maryland, U.S.A. In the first phase, make a selection of diagnosis/procedures to develop. In the second phase, organize a development team consisted of eight expertises working in maternity nursing area. In the third phase, analyze the overall medical service offered to patient through review medical records and decided the service content and the implementation period for the Cesarean section patient. In the forth phase, make out a preliminary critical pathway after verification of expert group on content validity. In the fifth phase, validity operate to ten Cesarean section patients to test implementation in practice by using the preliminary critical pathway, In the sixth phase, defined the final critical pathway. The result of this study was as follows. 1. There were classified 8 categories as monitoring/assesment, treatment, medication, activity, diet, test, consult, education/discharge plan for vertical axis and showed hospital stayed from admission to discharge for horizontal axis of critical pathway through analysis 68 Cesarean section patients medical records. 2. After critical review 68 medical records to make out a preliminary critical pathway, hospital stays for horizontal axis were showed 6 days, mean hospital stays were 7.5 days, 2.1 days were to be taken operation after admission and 4.2 days were stayed until discharge after operation. 3. After making out a questionare in 90 items of a medical service content of eight categories and verifying the content validity of expertises, the 85 items of the preliminary critical pathway were selected by expertises agreement over 88% and modified or deleted 5 items showing agreement below 75%. 4. After verifying a validity to 10 patients for 4 weeks, hospital stays were 5.9 days. There were deleted 1 item and modified or supplemented the 9 items of the 10 items.

• Journal of Korean Society of Forest Science
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• v.106 no.2
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• pp.111-120
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• 2017

The best source of information on the conservation status of species at a global scale is the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. Until now, 236 vascular plants from Korean peninsula have been evaluated using the IUCN red list categories and criteria. It indicated that five taxa were considered as critically endangered, 20 as endangered and nine as vulnerable species as a threatened status. On the other hand, the rest (189 taxa) were assessed as a least concern, which did not qualify for threatened species categories. Korea Ministry of Environment published a revised version of 57 species list by re-classifying endangered species with idiosyncratic qualitative criteria for two levels (I and II) followed by status reviews in 2011. However, two thirds species proposed by Ministry of Environment do not qualify as threatened. The major difficulties found in applying IUCN Red List criteria at the global scale was a lack of knowledge on the status of species at broader geographic scales and the perceived difficulty the causes. The lack of consistency between two lists constrains the prioritization of species-based conservation work at the national level. Due to a lack of centralized monitoring data for most species, this status is largely qualitatively and so it carries a high level of uncertainty. This is reflected in the high number of species with an unknown population trend. The current list of endangered species of flora and fauna by the Ministry of Environment should be recognized as the national list (local and population extinction), which is different from the IUCN Red list due to the different geographical contexts. Also, it is necessary to improve the quality of evaluation and conservation management system rather than presenting massive number of endangered species list.

• Journal of Digital Convergence
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• v.14 no.6
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• pp.325-333
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• 2016

This study was conducted to provide the base line for the use of prophylactic antibiotics and the standard of antibiotic use and the evaluation based on analysis of current use, quality assessment and periodic changes of prophylactic antibiotics in a university hospital. We chose the year 2008, 2009, 2010, 2012, and 2014 as the study periods since the primary evaluation on the first year of implementation in 2007. For this study, healthcare benefit quality assessment data from the Health Insurance Review and Assessment Service was used. We analyzed the differences each year of treatment period; one category for initial treatment timing, three categories for selecting antibiotics, and two categories for the length of treatment from multiple evaluation indices of gastric surgeries, colorectal surgeries, and cholecystectomy. The analysis revealed the followings: Regarding length of antibiotics treatment, total days of treatment decreased down to 1.5, 1.5, and 0.6 days in the year 2014, from 13.5, 12.8, and 6.9 days in the year 2007, for gastric surgeries, colorectal surgeries, and cholecystectomy. Based on these outcomes, the efforts to devise efficient delivery and distribution of the recommendations or indices which medical staff could adhere for quality improvement of the prophylactic antibiotics would be necessary. Also implementing monitoring system to help the hospitals to acknowledge their own faults may be helpful.

• Journal of Korean Society for Geospatial Information Science
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• v.1 no.1 s.1
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• pp.193-201
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• 1993

In a number of areas, there are important benefits to be gained when we bring both the detection and monitoring abilities of remote sensing as well as the philosophical approach and analytic capabilities of a geographic information system to bear on a problem. A key area in the joint applications of remote sensing technology and GIS is to identify change. Whether this change is of interest for its own sake, or because the change causes us to act (for example, to update a map), remote sensing provides an excellent suite of tools for detecting change. At the same time, a GIS is perhaps the best analytic toot for quantifying the process of change. There are two alternative methods for quantifying changes. The conceptually simple approach is to un the pixel values in each of the images. This method is practical but may be too simple to identify the variety of changes in a complex scene. The common alternative is called symbolic change detection. The analyst first decides on a set of thematic categories that are important to distinguish for the application. This approach is useful only if accurate landuse/cover classifications can be obtained. Persons conducting digital change detection must be intimately familiar with the environment under study, the quality of the data set and the characteristics of change detection algorithms. Also, much work remains to identify optimum change detection algorithms for specific geographic areas and problems.

• Journal of Korean Society of Forest Science
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• v.104 no.2
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• pp.239-247
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• 2015

Since 2006, new national forest inventory in Korea has been restructured to assess current status and and monitor the changes in forest resources based on permanent sample plots. The objective of estimate this study is to assess changes in forest resources such as land use/cover categories and forest stand variables. For this study, permanent plot data were collected between 2006-2008 and 2011-2013 in Chungcheongbuk-do, respectively. In order to produce land use/cover change matrix which plays an important role as an activity data for estimating GreenHouse Gas inventory, permanent plots were classified into six land use/cover categories. Additionally, matrixes for assessing the changes in age class and dominant tree species can provide more detailed information. For forest stand variables(tree density, basal area, growing stock, mean diameter at breath height, and mean height), their growth and change were assessed. The periodic annual growth ratios for tree density and basal area were slightly declined whereas that of growing stock was estimated to be about 3.7%. The uncertainty of changes in forest stand variables is less than 5%, except for tree density (RSE: 58%). The variation of tree density is relatively high compared to the other variables.

• Journal of the Korean Association of Geographic Information Studies
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• v.16 no.4
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• pp.171-188
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• 2013

Landuse changes and cadastral information error categories in the four major river areas were analyzed for the use of policy data as cadastral re-arrangement of national and public lands would be required, using high-resolution air-photographs and cadastral maps before and after the river development. The study sites were the river areas of 40km around four dams of the Nakdong river where their landuses were changed most. As the results, national and public lands reached 79.9% of land parcels and 93.3% of land areas of the study sites similar with those of the four river areas, 84.3% of land parcels and 85.5% of land areas. The landuse classification of the study sites before the four river development was consisted most of 'river'(71.6%) and 'rice field'(12.3%), but after the development the 'river' was reduced to 42.7% and 'park area'(19.6%) including sport fields and 'mixed lots'(20.8%) were increased. Also, 86.7% of land parcels before the development could be reduced after the development if administrative districts and land ownerships were not considered. Cadastral information error categories can be found as cadastral polygon missing, polygon overlap, location and boundary non-coincidence, small polygon generation, and non-coincidence between cadastral boundary and river boundary. Landuse change monitoring method using air-photographs will be useful to analyze landuse state through fast information aquisition and to manage properties of national and public lands such as river areas.