• Journal of the Economic Geographical Society of Korea
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• v.1 no.2
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• pp.71-84
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• 1998

Health has been seen as a resource necessary for both maintaining oneself and for living in a society pursuing high quality of life. Therefore, the medicare provision takes place of one of the most significant indexes for evaluating the regional welfare level. The purpose of this study is to investigate the locational characteristics of medicare service facilities. For the purpose, the distribution patterns of the medicare resources are analyzed both at the regional and local scales. The medicare resources are concentrated at the Metropolitan Seoul area in the regional scale, and they are also concentrated at the economic core areas in the local scale. Especially, higher level medicare resources, such as the general hospitals and medical specialists, show more concentration at the economic core areas than lower level services. This means that access to opportunities to receive higher level medicare is poorer in a more socially disadvantaged area. Since medicare service facilities are invested and operated by both private and public sectors, whose locational mechanisms are deferent, we analyzed the distribution patterns. Most medicare facilities are invested and managed by private sector in Korea, which is operated by market mechanism. This is related with the fact that the medicare facilities are concentrated at the economic core areas. The proportion of private sector is higher in the Metropolitan Seoul area, and thus this region shows stronger spatial disparity of medicare provision. In general, the medicare service facilities are located in the hierarchical structure, and thus the services levels and facility scales are differentiated by the hierarchy. We examined the hierarchical structure in the medicare service facilities in Korea. The referral medicare system has been applied with the assumption of the three level hierarchical structures in Korea. However, we could not find any distinct hierarchical structure in the scales of the medical service facilities.

• Korean Institute of Interior Design Journal
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• v.14 no.2 s.49
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• pp.142-152
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• 2005

It is estimated that the need to build health facilities for the elderly will grow in the near future as the Korean society is aging. Thus the study on the spatial composition of 22 facilities as well as on the cases of health facilities for the elderly in Japan, where public health and medicare for aged people are well taken care of, was conducted and the following are the results: 1. As of 2000, there was one facility for every 8,000 and 1,100 aged citizen under long-term care, and these facilities secured beds enough for $8\%$ of those who need long-term care. 2. The spatial composition was categorized into general living space, long-term care, management, provision, and home assistance, and housing was provided. Moreover, the space was divided according to their nature of use, the arrangement, the form of entrance into the building, moving line inside, the relationship with the health facilities and their characteristics are analyzed based on different users, managers, moving line including that of provision of food, the relationship between different spaces with different functions as well as on the relationship between locations of each space. 3. The total capacity, building area and actual area of the welfare facilities for the elderly are analyzed, and area per person, detailed area for each space, percentage of each living space for long-term care patients and characteristics of recuperation room are suggested.