Oxygen Cafe Cheongsong-gun, Nationwide Local Government Health Centers Follow Suit for Benchmarking
On the 7th, Cheongsong-gun, Gyeongbuk Province, held a meeting at the Cheongsong-gun Office with the 'Hadong-gun Public Health Center Promotion Team (led by Hadong-gun Mayor Ha Seung-cheol)' to discuss key projects in public healthcare policy.
Cheongsong County Health Center, leading innovation in rural public healthcare, is attracting benchmarking visits from health centers across the country.
This meeting was initiated as Hadong-gun, which currently lacks public medical facilities, visited to benchmark the Cheongsong-gun Public Health Center ahead of establishing the 'Hadong-gun Public Health Center.'
The Cheongsong-gun Public Health Center is the only one among 15 regional public medical centers nationwide that operates its medical services through private consignment, gaining nationwide attention as a 'model case of rural public healthcare.'
In particular, it functions as the only general hospital in the area by operating eight medical departments. For three departments with high medical demand?internal medicine, family medicine, and orthopedics?specialists from the entrusted institution work as paid doctors (fee doctors). Other departments, including pediatrics, rehabilitation medicine, radiology, dentistry, Korean medicine, and the emergency room, are staffed by public health doctors affiliated with the health center.
Additionally, for essential but hard-to-access specialties in rural areas such as ophthalmology and obstetrics and gynecology, a cooperative system has been established with Andong Seongso Hospital, the entrusted institution, where specialists from the main hospital provide a 'special visiting clinic once a month.' Since 2009, it has been designated as a regional emergency medical institution, operating a 24-hour emergency room and equipped with a system to transfer emergency surgery patients to higher-level hospitals within 15 minutes by doctor helicopter.
These efforts by Cheongsong-gun have become a representative innovative model that turns crisis into opportunity by finding solutions to the rural medical blind spots through collaboration with the private sector amid growing challenges of local extinction and public healthcare crises. This model has been benchmarked nationwide.
Since 2020, several public institutions have visited Cheongsong-gun to benchmark the overall operation and excellent consigned medical services of the health center, including the Chungbuk Danyang-gun Public Health Center three times, Gyeonggi-do Gapyeong-gun Public Health Center twice, as well as Gangwon-do Pyeongchang-gun Public Health Center, Chungnam Seocheon-gun Public Health Center, Gumi City Public Health Center, Pohang Nam-gu Public Health Center, and the Graduate School of Public Health at Kyungpook National University. In February this year, the National Medical Center, the research agency for Pyeongchang-gun Public Health Center, also visited.
Notably, the visit by the 'Hadong-gun Public Health Center Promotion Team,' led by Mayor Ha Seung-cheol himself, marked a meaningful first step toward opening the 'Hadong-gun Public Health Center,' as he personally came with related officials to Cheongsong-gun.
The director of Cheongsong-gun Public Health Center provided a direct briefing on the overall operation of the health center, the status of private consignment in medical services, and unique facilities such as medical staff accommodations, employee lounges, the Saengsaeng Rehabilitation Physical Therapy Room, and the childbirth and childcare sharing platform, stating, “The innovative reform of the public healthcare model at Cheongsong-gun Public Health Center is continuously underway.”
He also emphasized ongoing efforts to secure necessary budgets from the Local Extinction Response Fund to promote the construction of a health promotion center and a healing rehabilitation center for severely disabled persons, expand the Saengsaeng Rehabilitation Physical Therapy Room with an investment of 700 million KRW from the fund, and replace outdated equipment with various specialized treatment devices such as extracorporeal shock wave therapy machines, high-power lasers, and low-frequency stimulators, aiming to enhance excellent medical infrastructure in the challenging rural environment.
The Central Disaster and Safety Countermeasures Headquarters introduced the rapid medical response and handling by Cheongsong-gun Public Health Center during the COVID-19 pandemic as a national best practice,
and with the synergy effect of securing competent medical staff, diversifying medical fields, and operating a 24-hour emergency room, the annual medical treatment performance of Cheongsong-gun Public Health Center, including outpatient and inpatient care, has shown a sharp increase from 87,367 cases in 2022 to 95,759 cases last year.
Mayor Yoon Kyung-hee stated, “Cheongsong-gun Public Health Center is a representative innovative model of Cheongsong-gun, loved greatly by residents through private consignment operation of medical services, and is regarded as a model case that local governments and public health centers nationwide should follow. We will continue to make every effort to expand public healthcare services to overcome the medical disparities between rural and urban areas and the poor working conditions in medically underserved areas.”
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