Welfare minister inspects integrated nursing and care service ward at Korea University Guro Hospital

Minister of Health and Welfare Jeong Eun-kyeong (far left) listens to a hospital official's briefing during a visit to an essential medical care site in southern Gyeonggi Province on Sept. 9. [Ministry of Health and Welfare]
Minister of Health and Welfare Jeong Eun-kyeong (far left) listens to a hospital official's briefing during a visit to an essential medical care site in southern Gyeonggi Province on Sept. 9. [Ministry of Health and Welfare]

Minister of Health and Welfare Jeong Eun-kyeong said Friday she would develop effective policy reforms to ensure patients receive safer, higher-quality inpatient care and families face a lighter caregiving burden, pledging to closely review field feedback and actual operational outcomes from the integrated nursing and care service system.

Jeong made the remarks after visiting Korea University Guro Hospital in Guro-gu, Seoul, where she inspected the operations of an integrated nursing and care service ward and heard concerns and reform suggestions from hospital officials and frontline workers.

She said the focus had so far been on expanding the number of beds under the integrated nursing and care service system, but the time had come to draw up a long-term roadmap — one that ensures patients receive adequate care and creates a sustainable operating environment for providers.

The integrated nursing and care service is an inpatient program in which teams of nurses, nursing assistants and support staff provide both nursing and personal care to hospitalized patients, eliminating the need for family members or guardians to remain at the bedside.

Since the system's introduction in 2015, the government has gradually expanded the number of participating medical institutions and beds, while working to establish staffing standards that reflect patient acuity and nursing needs and to improve overall service quality.

At Friday's site visit, participants said demand from patients and their families for the integrated nursing and care service was strong, and called for an active expansion of participating beds.

Attendees also proposed establishing staffing standards that more fully reflect patient acuity and nursing needs, expanding ward support personnel, and building a reasonable compensation framework suited to the conditions of individual medical institutions. They further called for service models that can address the diverse care needs of different patient groups by more precisely categorizing nursing and caregiving requirements.


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