Medical centers and hospitals located in smaller towns and areas across the country will soon receive more nurses and trained medical staff, allowing them to take care of their district's medical needs, particularly patients in dire need of emergency medical treatment.

The Ministry of Health and Welfare announced on Nov. 24 that starting next year it would increase the number of nurses it dispatches to hospitals in rural communities. These efforts are part of one of the ministry’s projects launched in July to make up for the shortage of nursing manpower in less-populated areas.

Current laws covering the medical industry requires that an emergency room (ER) have at least five primary care nurses. However, results from a 2015 inspection of emergency medical treatment centers across the nation revealed that more than 68 percent of such centers located in less-populated communities were found to not meet the required manpower levels.

To deal with this shortage, since July the ministry has hired more nurses to reside in isolated communities or has dispatched two to five nurses to rural clinics in need.

Hospitals that have benefited from this project include ones on Baengnyeongdo Island in Ongjin-gun County, Incheon, in Cheongyang-gun County, Chungcheongnam-do Province, and in Wando-gun and Jindo-gun counties, both in Jeollanam-do Province. The ministry will expand this project to cover more rural areas across the nation next year.

“This project will allow medical centers in rural parts of the nation to run their emergency rooms more stably. This will, in turn, help local residents have easy access to emergency care in their hour of need, as well as improve the overall quality of treatment,” said an official from the health ministry.

By Sohn JiAe
Korea.net Staff Writer
Photos: Dankook University
jiae5853@korea.kr