Gangbuk-gu Mayor Lee Soon-hee Urges Seoul City to Fully Promote the Construction of a Children's Hospital

On the 7th, Seoul city officials and others visited Gangbuk-gu to review candidate sites for the Northeast Region Children's Specialty Hospital
Lee Soon-hee, Gangbuk-gu Mayor, strongly urged Seoul city officials to "proceed as originally planned"

Lee Soon-hee, the Mayor of Gangbuk-gu, strongly conveyed to the Seoul Metropolitan Government on the 7th the necessity and determination to establish the ‘Gangbuk Municipal Children’s Specialized Hospital’ in Gangbuk-gu.

She personally met with Seoul officials who visited the Gangbuk area that day to review candidate sites for the ‘Northeast Region Children’s Specialized Hospital’ and actively demanded that they fulfill the promise made to Seoul citizens to build the hospital in Gangbuk-gu.

The Gangbuk Municipal Children’s Specialized Hospital construction project is part of the ‘Gangnam-Gangbuk Balanced Development Policy’ that Seoul has been promoting since 2018. The original plan and promise were to build a public office and a children’s specialized hospital with 214 beds on the site of the Northern Metropolitan Waterworks Office and Road Office located at 365-1 Beon-dong, Gangbuk-gu, to meet the demand for a children’s hospital in the northeast region.

However, in October 2022, Seoul suddenly withdrew the investment review, completely scrapping the plan. Currently, the scope has been expanded to include eight autonomous districts?Gangbuk-gu, Gwangjin-gu, Nowon-gu, Dobong-gu, Dongdaemun-gu, Seongdong-gu, Seongbuk-gu, and Jungnang-gu?and candidate sites are being reconsidered.

On that day, the mayor met with Seoul officials at the Gangbuk-gu Public Health Center and said, “The Gangbuk Municipal Children’s Specialized Hospital was a project that the residents of Gangbuk-gu, who lack a tertiary general hospital, had high expectations for.” She added, “It is an unfair act that damages administrative credibility to suddenly reconsider the project entirely without clear explanations, even though the basic framework, including the announcement of the construction plan, was already established.” She earnestly requested that the project proceed as originally planned.

The district office stated that Seoul’s reconsideration of the Northeast Region Children’s Hospital construction project due to traffic inconvenience is unfounded. The area around the planned Beon-dong site has smooth vehicle flow, convenient access to public transportation such as Suyu Station on Subway Line 4 and buses, and since it is common to use private cars or taxis when accompanied by infants and toddlers, there is no problem at all.

Furthermore, the Northeast Line urban railway is scheduled to open in 2026, and the area around the site is adjacent to four northeastern districts?Gangbuk, Dobong, Seongbuk, and Nowon?where apartment complexes are concentrated and large-scale redevelopment projects are underway, so population growth is expected. The district office has conveyed to Seoul several times that the current site at 365-1 Beon-dong is the optimal location.