• Journal of Preventive Medicine and Public Health
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• v.31 no.3 s.62
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• pp.564-578
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• 1998

Most extended care facilities have admitted both the healthy and unhealthy elderly, among which members' average caring demand vary. The Aged Welfare Law, however, currently provides no reasonable basis on the staffing policy for extended care facilities. It just reflects the admitted number of the elderly rather than differences in members' average caring demand among facilities. This study is designed to estimate the need for caring staff on the basis of the correlation between the individual health status measured by various tools including Activities of Daily Living and caring demand by actual service time for each one. The sample included all of the admitted elderly(187 persons) in 4 extended care facilities, two in Seoul and the other two in Kangwon-Do over the survey period October 5 through October 20, 1996. The survey process consisted of 3 stages. (1) The current staffing information was collected through self-completed written questionnaires left for head of official in each facility. (2) Six graduate students at School of Public Health interviewed all residents to collect information on their health status and sociodemographics. The response rate for the interview was relatively high(85%). (3) Information on direct and indirect caring time consumed for each residents came from self-completed written questionnaires given to nurses and helpers in each target facilities. Analysis of the data was made using Pearson's correlation and multiple regression technique through SAS program. Based on this procedure, the following was found. 1. No facility meet the staffing standard in the Aged Welfare Law completely. 2. It is actual service time that is most correlated with ADL(Activities of daily living). 3. When all of the elderly are divided by four groups based on the level of ADL, the mean values of needed caring time in each group are 15, 21, 36 and 88 minutes respectively. 4. There is no significant difference among facilities in distribution of elderly person by group. 5. No facility meets the estimated number of nurses and helpers which reflects health status of the admitted elderly. Therefore, it is required that severity of the admitted elderly be considered in establishing staffing standard for extended care facility.

• Journal of Korean Academy of Nursing
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• v.31 no.1
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• pp.94-106
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• 2001

The purpose of this study was to verify the use of Seo's Elderly Stress Scale (SESS), which was developed in 1996. Through the modified tool, it is possible to examine the stress of Korean elders and to contribute to the welfare of them. The subjects were 350 elders over 65 years old who live in Seoul, Kwang-Ju, Yang-Ju Gun Kyung-ki Do, Ui-Jong Bu, and Young-Am Kun, Jeun-Ra Nam Do. the data of 331 elders (94%) were analyzed. Data were collected between January and March in 1996 and analyzed using the SPSS Win 8.0. The result are as follows: 1. Items with low correlation with the total items were removed. So 27 items were removed and 37 items remained. This 37 items were death in the family and/or close friends, family member's behavior not meeting expectations, marriage of daughter, marriage of son, friction with daughter- in-law, argument among children, children refuse to live with parent, children leaving home, sex injury or accident, in frequest visits from children and grandchildren, providing care for your daughter or daughter-in-law post-partum, decrease in decision making and authority in home, Lunar new year and the harvest featival, house sitting, working in the house, performing a sacrificial rite, missed birthday, not living with the eldest son, decreased eyesight, decreased strength, decreased memory, sleep pattern changes, thoughts about death, loneliness, decreased hearing, change of dental condition, change in your diet or eating style, difficulty in self care, moving because of disease or aging, argument with friend or neighbour, travel, dealing with the procedure of heritage, loss of money or property, not enough pocket money, hearing on elderly neglect in television or radio, hope of going home and ignorant from others. 2. Overlapped items were discussed by colleagues and were modified. 'marriage of daughter' and 'marriage of son' were modified in 'marriage of children'. 'self injury or accidents' and 'family accidents' were modified in to self or family accidents. 3. Factor analysis was done in order to identify validity and three factors were obtained from the result. The first factor familial relation area, included 17 items. The second factor, physical area, included 9 items. The third factor, psycho-socio-economic area, included 9 items. Cronbach coefficient alpha for the 35 items was .923. 4. Pearson's correlation was .704 between SESS and SOS (Symptoms of Stress) in order to confirm construct validity. Based on the result, the following is suggested; 1. The modified SESS needs to be reverified with elder. 2. Korean elder's health promotion can be made by development of stress intervention which was accurately measured with SESS.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.116-127
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• 2013

Korea, like most of other countries, is enforcing the national pension as social insurance which is a kind of the income policy. Despite the fundamental limitation on public pension or the imperfect policy, the guarantee of the minimum living standard for maintaining dignity of human being is not being reached for the standard. Poverty rate of the elderly in Korea is the first among the OECD countries and public pension dead zone is very large. The elderly low income class could become a serious social problem if low fertility and aging keep getting worse. In this study, I will analyze the present condition of the retirement security for the elderly in South Korea. Also, I will look into the present situation of old-age income security and determine problems, and propose the improvement devices for related laws.

• Korean Journal of Social Welfare
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• v.42
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• pp.41-82
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• 2000

The purpose of this study is to provide empirical findings about intragenerational and intergenerational discrepancies in eldercare attitude and behavior in Korea. Specifically, intragenerational discrepancies refer to phenomena in which eldercare attitude and behavior diverge from each other within the caregiving and care-receiving generations, respectively. Intergenerational discrepancies, on the other hand, refer to two kinds of phenomena, one in which eldercare attitudes are different between caregiver and care-receiver and the other in which eldercare behavior is differently recognized between the two parties. For the last couple decades, these kinds of discrepancies tended to be simply assumed without any coherent theoretical and/or empirical rationales. Thus, the current study tried to investigate the degree, pattern, and characteristics associated with the discrepancies. Analysis of data collected from 276 matched pairs of caregivers (i.e., daughters-in-law) and care-receivers (i.e., the elderly) in Kwangju and its suburb areas has indicated a substantial amount of both intra- and inter-generational discrepancies. In other words, both caregivers and care-receivers were found to be experiencing huge discrepancies between attitude and behavior in their respective generation: the factual discrepancies in attitude between the two generations were quite salient: the cognitive discrepancies in behavior between them were salient, too. In addition, it was also found' that the extent to which the discrepancies became salient differed for the three subdimensions of eldercare (i.e., emotional, economic, and physical care), and that such discrepancies have intimate relationships with a set of sociodemographic characteristics for caregivers - notably, age, educational attainment, area of residence, household income - on the one hand, and those for care-receivers - notably, gender, age, educational attainment, cohabitation, family size, inheritance, owned property - on the other. A series of theoretical, empirical, and clinical implications stemming from the findings were suggested and fully discussed in the context of Korean society.

• Journal of Family Resource Management and Policy Review
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.53-68
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• 2014

Increasing interest in family problems caused by social environment changes has elevated the importance of strong family policy. That is why Framework Act on Healthy Families has enacted in 2004 in Korea and it marked the 10th anniversary of establishing the law. This study finds out the meaning of enacting the law and an academic field of Family Resource Management through reviewing and analyzing the studies on the healthy families from 2000 to 2013 year in Journal of Korean Family Resource Management Association. The major findings of this study are as follows. First, we divide research themes into three parts: policy, practice(I)(center management), practice(II)(program development & efficiency), specialist area. The research trends have most focused on the issue of practice(II), that is, program analysis and development, contents review, because of the settlement of delivery system after the early of law establishment. But it is needed to rethink research themes because it has been dealt with not academical researches on theoretical basis but practical ones, for example, program development on Healthy Families Center and the tendency still lasts until now. Second, more than half of research methods have been concentrated on contents analysis and about 70% of research objects are focused on the center program. It needs to adopt various research methods and research objects. Lastly, it is necessary to make an academic identity clear that can be faithful to Family Resource Management Studies.

• Journal of Digital Convergence
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• v.12 no.8
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• pp.501-513
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• 2014

The purpose of this study was to examine experiences of caring parents-in-law in Korea among daughters-in-law who are currently caring their parents-in-law while living with them, or have experienced such care-giving, and who have been married for at least 5 years. Daughters-in-law this study deals with are from three countries: Korean women, Chinese and Japanese women who immigrated to Korea by getting married with Korean husbands. To find out those women who can express their experiences clearly, this study used an intentional sampling method where this study asked the Multicultural Family Support Center to recommend five Chinese and five Japanese housewives who matched the following qualifications: those who have experiences of caring their parents-in-law at home, who have lived in Korea for at least five years, and who had no difficulty in expressing their opinions in Korean language. Korean married women were recommended by the neighbors. This study conducted in-depth interviews to those 15 housewives from Korea, china, and Japan. Before doing the interview, this study gave explanation of the contents and aims of this study to those interview participants over phone, and got the written consent from each of the women. To analyze the interview data, Colaizzi's phenomenological method was used. The emergent themes identified in the findings were as follows: 'positive perception of traditional nature of filial duty', 'help and encouragement by those who are nearby', 'exhausting marriage life', 'Korean family culture that is hard to adapt to', and 'unreasonable male-focused patriarchal culture.'

• Korean Journal of Social Welfare
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• v.66 no.3
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• pp.209-230
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• 2014

The study is to show the prevalence of double-care burdened households who care simultaneously for children(under 6) and provide invalid elderly care for aging parents among women aged 30s to 40s in Korea. The study aims to place care as ordinary needs for our whole lifetime, not as a special happening to a certain age group at specific period. Also, study attempts to reveal that care experiences include both burden and pleasure, and that care relationship, such as care giver-receiver-assistants(second-helpers), strongly affects the diversity of caring experience. Results are as follows. 38.1% of the survey respondents report that they are/have ever been the double-care burdened households who carry both child care under 6 and elderly care suffering from health problems in the past or the present. If including those who expecting the double burden of care in the near future, the prevalence rate goes up to 54.9%. As hypothesized, caring includes both pleasure and burden. The order of pleasant feelings is child care> parents care>in-law parents care, and that of burden is in reverse. However, caring relationship has a strong influence on pleasure or agony of the caring experience. The association between the relationship and the experience, which is expressed by pleasure or pain, occurs to both daughter-parents and in-laws. Interestingly, the caring experiences by daughter to her parents tend to go more burdensome because their husbands do not commit their identity as carer aid, with no additional caring effort for their in-laws. In conclusion, some policy suggestions for double care problems are provided.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.13 no.12
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• pp.5816-5825
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• 2012

As the society has been ageing, senile dementia increase rapidly. Thus social costs of dementia treatment and management increase exceedingly. There is a desperate need of finding out improvements.. For example, foreign countries come with the solutions about this issue by establishing national strategy about Dementia, setting effective Dementia Management in national level and preparing legal systems. Older Welfare Act, Long Term Care Insurance Act for the Aged and Dementia Management Act exist as legal system of improvements. Improvement about this issue is needed due to more effective Dementia management and pushing ahead policies. First of all, the government needs to include dementia checkup into the list of national health insurance checkup toward senior citizen of older than 65-year-old. Secondly, as one of the characteristics of dementia, when more symptoms of dementia appear, there is less effect of treatment. Therefore, in order to reduce the social costs of Dementia, the government needs to promote Dementia prevention industry and early checkups. Thirdly, there is a need of setting a class judgement standard appeasement policy and expansion of using target. The reason of processing this statement is that there are difficulties of satisfying the needs of senior citizens due to current conformity of long-term pay recuperation according to laws of welfare.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.13 no.5
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• pp.234-242
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• 2013

In 2007, Long-Term Care Insurance Law was enacted to share the family burden of caring for the elderly who are unable to perform every day living activities due to their old age and chronic diseases such as senile dementia, diabetes mellitus, stroke and more. Backed by this law, since 2008, care workers have been sent to the elderly care centers or each elder's home to help them not only with their recovery from illnesses, but also with general activities from dressing, eating, bathing, walking even to toileting. However, according to the recently released survey by National Human Rights Commission, it has been found that the caring workers are in a very poor working condition including low income, abused blanket wage system, shortage of welfare services, extra works and even sexual harrassment. It is becoming an important issue due to fast-ageing population, the fact that the care workers have had experiences of violation in their right of labor while they are at work needs to be carefully treated. In that sense, this article presents some difficulties the caring workers face and proposes effective ways to solve these problems through the perspective of human rights and human labor rights based on the report written by National Human Rights Commission. In short, for this law to function properly and to boost the worker's capability of providing better services to beneficiaries, followings can be good answers - enhanced management and supervision on caring plans and care centers, providing immediate counselling and protection for victimized care givers, training courses offered to promote service receiver's sincere respect and strengthened awareness upon care givers.

• Clinical and Experimental Pediatrics
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• v.52 no.8
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• pp.843-850
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• 2009

A recent High Court's decision regarding the withdrawal of life supporting medical treatment (artificial ventilator) from an elderly female patient in the terminal stage has opened up a new era of the "euthanasia dispute" in Korea. With this decision, the legitimate withdrawal of life supporting treatment became possible under certain conditions and the Korean Medical Association is working toward the establishment of practical guidelines for the terminal-stage patients. However, there are still very few debates on the cases of pediatric patients in the terminal stage or suffering from fatal diseases. For pediatric patients, the core principle of autonomy and following procedure of "advance directives" are hardly kept due to the immaturity of the patients themselves. Decisions for their lives usually are in the hands of the parents, which may often bring out tragic disputes around "child abuse", especially in Korea where parents have exclusive control of the destiny of their children. Some developed countries such as the U.S.A., the U.K. and Canada have already established guidelines or a legal framework for ensuring the rights of the healthcare system regarding children suffering from severe illness, permitting the withdrawal of Life supporting medical treatment (LSMT) in very specific conditions when the quality of life of the children is severely threatened. For the protection of the welfare and interest of the children, we should discuss this issue and develop guidelines for the daily practice of pediatricians.