• Korean Journal of Adult Nursing
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• v.27 no.4
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• pp.418-427
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• 2015

Purpose: Focus group interviews were conducted to explore the current status and barriers of health care services in nursing home from the viewpoint of staffs taking care of nursing home residents. Methods: A qualitative thematic analysis using the focus group interview method was used. A total of 32 health care professionals (19 nurses and 13 social workers) from thirteen nursing homes in South Korea attended (5 focus groups) in 2014. Results: The two main themes were identified: 'minimal health care services that left personal care needs unmet' which has three subthemes of 'stereotyped and fragmented care by types of care providers', 'medically-oriented health care services' and 'health care services mixed with social or recreational programs'; and 'barriers to proper and timely care in nursing homes' with four subthemes including 'unmet care needs due to cognitive dysfunction or lack of expression', 'care guides or tools not suitable for long-term care facilities', 'health care needs that are beyond the facility's care boundary', and 'care delay due to lack of understanding on the older adult's status'. Conclusion: The findings from this study should help health care policy makers to recognize the factors that influence health care services and provide direction for nurses and other staffs involved in supporting health care services for nursing home residents.

• 한국노년학
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• v.40 no.4
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• pp.599-616
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• 2020

The South Korean government has introduced a new Customized Care Service for Older Adults by eliminating the six existing care services for them since 2020. It is a significant change of care service system for older adults and the service would play a key role in providing preventive services for them. The aim of the study is to examine the meaning and tasks of the introduction of the Customized Care Services for Older Adults in South Korea by using the framework of Gilbert and Terrell. The study found that the new service was designed under the government's policy contexts of the establishments of public-based social service providers and the emphasis of community care, and it has brought about a number of significant institutional changes of care system in terms of allocation, benefits, delivery, and finance. The institutional coverage of the service was increased to lower 70% of older adults and a large number of kinds of health and social care services would be provided for them. The sphere of living was set in each local area and the new service providers are entirely in charge of providing the services in each sphere. The financing system was changed to support service providers by providing government subsidies. Although a number of positive results would be expected to occur for the elderly, it is likely that some challenging tasks would happen in the fields as follows: the inadequate coverage, the vagueness of the application of self-care principle and the decrease in the amounts of direct care services, the inappropriate area of service provision, and the supplier-oriented provision of services rather than user-oriented.

• 한국사회정책
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• v.23 no.1
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• pp.61-93
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• 2016

This research aims to analyze the role of social care services after the unification, assuming that the unification would occur in 2020 in a peaceful manner. While much has been discussed about the unification in recent years inside or outside academia, most of discussion tends to focus on political and economic dimensions. Also, social policy studies on North Korean defectors have increased, but few pay attention to social policy strategies after the possible unification. In this context, this study explores various explicit and implicit roles of social care services and possible strategies after the unification. As research methodology, it employs one of the scenario methods, 'TAIDA', for projecting and simulating uncertain future. In so doing, first, it reviews South and North Korean socio-economic experiences during last two decades as feedback and German unification experiences as feedforward. In addition, it utilizes a expert survey. Based on the reviews together with the survey result, it discusses various influences of social care services after the unification and draws policy implications. This research aruges that social care services could have profound effects on the stability of socio-economic conditions after the unification.

• Journal of Family Resource Management and Policy Review
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• v.27 no.1
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• pp.13-24
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• 2023

The 4th industrial revolution came deep into family life and changed the way of housework and care. The change in the family caused by the technological change of the 4th industrial revolution is remarkable in terms of socialization of housework. In this study, the socialization of housework, which is accelerating in the era of the 4th industrial revolution, was examined focusing on the change in the aspect of "household service" through the "platform". Since 2015, when technological changes in the 4th industrial revolution began to decline, related newspaper articles were extracted for daily and economic newspapers nationwide and analyzed big data. The results of big data analysis show that the platform economy using the 4th industrial revolution technology is rapidly spreading the socialization of housework not only at the business level but also at the public policy level. It has been confirmed that support for household services through the platform is growing into a new business area of companies, and at the public policy level, it is being treated as an important policy task in supporting work-family balance or responding to infectious diseases. This study is meaningful in that it provided an opportunity to reflect on the roles and tasks of the family, market, and state for housework and care in the future through changes in housework and care caused by the 4th industrial revolution technology.

• Journal of Korean Critical Care Nursing
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• v.5 no.2
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• pp.1-14
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• 2012

Purpose: This study was aimed to describe ethical dilemmas and types of coping behaviors among nurses who worked in intensive care units (ICUs). Methods: Data were collected by 2 focus group interviews with 12 ICU nurses in an academic affiliated hospital in Seoul, Korea. All interviews were tape-recorded and transcribed, and data were analyzed by modified qualitative content analysis. Results: Three themes emerged from the focus group interviews: "Respect for Persons (2 contents)", "Beneficence (13 contents)", "Justice (1 content)". Coping behaviors against the dilemmas were consultations with the doctors or colleagues, acceptance, guilt, reflection, forgetting, endurance, and frustration. Conclusion: The results of this study help us to understand ethical dilemmas that nurses experienced in ICUs and their coping behaviors. It would be useful to develop education programs for nurses in ICUs to support coping strategies for ethical dilemmas.

• Journal of Preventive Medicine and Public Health
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• v.27 no.2 s.46
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• pp.186-193
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• 1994

This paper is an attempt to identify major challenges to be faced by the Korean health care delivery system for about 30 years in the future and to deliberate over possible policy responses to them. It is not intended to make a precise prediction of the future profile of the system, but the focus is given to understanding what we have to do from now on in order to develop health care in Korea toward a desirable direction. Although the discussion has been made in a rather fragmented manner, it would hopefully provide stepping stones for a systematic study of the Korean health care system from a long range perspective.

• Industrial Engineering and Management Systems
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.239-250
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• 2016

This study is to prepare curriculum in South Korea to train outstanding individual in the fields of Health Care Management for the global age, hospitals' administration managers, professors and students were targeted to carry out the survey and the collected questionnaires were processed with SPSS Ver. 21.0 statistic package, based on this the suitability of the current Health Care Management curriculum and postgraduate curriculum was inspected and improvement plan was deducted, and also through comparative analysis of the Health Care Management curriculum for undergraduate and postgraduate in the United Kingdom and United States, optimum improvement suggestions were made. Based on the research result, the priority to improve and consolidate from undergraduate curriculum was the strengthening of the working-level education, the most needed ability in the future is global negotiation and dispute/conflict adjustment which needs supplementation. Also, after analyzing the undergraduate curriculum of the United States and United Kingdom, it is needed that the development of the capacity to lead organizations for healthcare and subjects for the establishment of health policy should be reflected.

• Journal of the Korea Safety Management & Science
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• v.23 no.1
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• pp.1-8
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• 2021

The purpose of this study is to investigated occupational accidents of child care worker. We surveyed 392 childcare worker to investigate their experience of occupational accidents. Fifteen percent of the respondents from occupational accdients survey for child care workers reported that they had experienced more than one occupational accident, but mostly did not claim Occupational Safety and Health Insurance. We suggested policy tasks to improve system for protecting child care workers.

• Health Policy and Management
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• v.23 no.1
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• pp.3-18
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• 2013

This paper investigates the possibility of expanding pay-for-performance (P4P) program as a provider payment system, in terms of financial, economical, and political sustainability. In order to expand the sustainable P4P, P4P should have usefulness in terms of economic value as well as efficiency in the financial aspects of health care. More importantly, the P4P would be politically sustainable only when both providers and consumers can accept. Korea's healthcare system seems to have logical ground for the P4P program financially and economically. However, how well the P4P can work remains to be proven in its implementation. After 43 tertiary hospitals applied the P4P program for acute myocardial infarction (AMI) and C-section in 2007, the number of hospitals adopting the P4P program for AMI and C-section has increased to 316 in 2011, and an incentive for hospitals applying the P4P has risen to 2% from 1% of health insurance benefits. This shows that the P4P program introduced by Health Insurance Review and Assessment Service is quite successful. In addition, people are aware of the need for improved P4P program and policy alternatives have been already made. Therefore, it is very important to come up with politically supportable strategies that can make providers and consumers accept the P4P program while maintaining the governance of the existing health insurance policy. To this end, there are some tasks to be considered. First, the expansion of the P4P program should be placed on the agenda of the Health Insurance Policy Review Committee, the highest decision-making body, and a separate agency for P4P planning should be established. Second, for more efficient P4P program, the processes of review and assessment, currently carried out separately, should be integrated into a single process. Third, infrastructure to measure the quality of medical services should be sharply expanded. Fourth, the current paradigm for the assessment should be changed. Lastly, a P4P program for consumers should be considered. Given that the consumers in Korea can use medical services freely, the National Health Insurance Corporation could initiate the P4P program for consumers as a means of controlling excessive use of medical services and adjusting consumer's moral hazard.

• Health Policy and Management
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• v.12 no.4
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• pp.91-113
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• 2002

We report and analyze the Korean physicians' recent general strike over the implementation of the Separation of Prescribing and Dispensing Practice (SPDP) in which more than 18,000 private clinics and 280 hospitals participated. Utilizing game-theoretic models of bargaining we explain why the Korean physicians were so successful in organizing intense collective action against the government and securing very favorable policy outcomes. In particular, we highlight the role of distributional conflict among social actors in shaping the details of institutional reform. The introduction of the SPDP was a necessary first step in the overall reform of health care system in Korea. However, the SPDP was perceived to be a serious threat to the economic viability of their profession by the vast majority of Korean physicians who had long been relied on the profits from selling medicines to compensate for the loss of income due to the low service fee under the previous health care system. The strong political coalition among heterogeneous physicians enabled them to organize an intense form of collective action, the general strike. Thus, physicians were successful not only in dragging the government to a bargaining table, but also winning in the bargaining and securing an outcome vastly favorable to them. On the other hand, the lack of an overall reform plan in the health care policy area, especially the finance of the National Health Insurance and the need for maintaining an image as a successful reform initiator, motivated the government to reach a quick resolution with the striking physicians.