The changes to the environment of public health and medicine have shifted the focus of health and medical policies from treatments to prevention, early detection, and treatment of diseases and to promotion of public health by the government to reduce ...
The changes to the environment of public health and medicine have shifted the focus of health and medical policies from treatments to prevention, early detection, and treatment of diseases and to promotion of public health by the government to reduce the medical expenses. With the changes to the health projects, the local autonomy system was introduced and the people's living standards have improved. Thus the citizens demand more and more diverse medical services to promote and manage their health in addition to the old prevention and treatment services of infectious diseases. But a public health center has limitations in meeting those more various needs, which calls for identifying and carrying out such health and medical projects as can fit the local characteristics, vitalizing the networks among the concerned agencies and individual organizations in local health, medicine, and welfare, and searching for their mutual functions and roles. The ultimate role of a public health center should be to help the residents lead a healthy and happy life physically, mentally, and socially by providing them with more practical health and medical service. The reality of public medical agencies including a public health center puts restrictions on their performance of medical service; their facilities and medical equipments are aged and in shortage, and there is no enough medical workforce and budget. Thus it's difficult to carry out public health projects in practice. It's also problematic that those public medical agencies have become less differentiated from their private counterparts in terms of functions and roles and been going through an identity crisis.
The first concept of a public health center in the world history was suggested by the Dawson Committee in the Great Britain in 1920. The concept was a combination of primary medical service and organized prevention service. Korea saw the foundation of its first public health center right after it took back its independence on August 15, 1945 by the American military administration. In 1946 Seoul set up a model public health center, which was the very first example with an organization. Since then there was an active economic growth in Korea and the Public Health Center Act was changed to the Local Health Act. As of 2006, there were 251 public health centers, 1,280 public health branches, and 1,911 public clinics across the nation based on the Local Health Act.
A survey on the clients' satisfaction with the medical service of a public health center in 2006 revealed that a public health center ranked at the first place defeating a general hospital, clinic, Oriental Medicine clinic, and pharmacy. Despite the encouraging result, however, one can hardly deny the realistic tasks faced by a public health center such as the organizational, functional, human resources, and financial problems.
A public health center needs to provide the citizens with more practical health and medical service so that they can live a healthy and happy life in the physical, mental, and social aspects. In an attempt to help it provide more enhanced medical service, the following measures were suggested.
There should be local base hospitals, they should expand more medical and treatment service to the urban areas with poor access to medical service; a public health center needs to provide treatment service by networking with house call and welfare projects, there should be mutual connections among public health and medical agencies by specializing the functions for the delivery system of public health and medicine, setting up an effective network among public medical agencies, and arranging the central organization to perform overall medication roles, there should be a supply of professional public medical personnel and strategies to motivate them, they need to develop and practice evaluation criteria for local health and medical plans, a certain percentage of budget should be secured for prevention, education, and research investment, and local governments need to make efforts to secure their own financial resources. Taking advantage of those measures, a public health center will hopefully supplement the private medical system in terms of functions and lead the reform as a public health and medical agency playing the most pivotal role in promoting the national health.