The government should raise the status of the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency (KDCA) to the tentatively titled “Ministry of Health” to integrate the management and operation of the public health system.
The Korea Institute of Public Administration, a government-financed research organization, said so in a recent study on strategy in the post-Covid-19 era.
“Quarantine and medical responses indeed have entirely different infrastructures and supply systems,” the study said. “However, in the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, Korea had to continue taking quarantine steps not based on the reality focusing on reducing medical burdens rather than strengthening response system, because of its unilateral quarantine governance.”
Calling for a quarantine system that can mobilize necessary resources at the right time with proper authority and cooperation among medical institutions focusing on patient treatment, the study said Korea needs a system that can link and coordinate between public health and public medicine areas.
“Accordingly, the nation needs a government ministry that can simultaneously provide medical service, including essential health and medical service, and play the role of a public health control tower of population groups, including quarantine response,” the institute said. “One of the incoming government’s state tasks should be raising the KDCA to the Ministry of Health.”
To speed up the establishment of the public health and medical system by the proposed new ministry, the study cited the unification of public medical service institutions and delivery systems as the foremost task.
More specifically, it proposed to unify the public medicine delivery system centered on the National Medical Center (NMC) and its provincial counterparts, which should also present public health and medicine standards and future directions to responsible medical institutions, including private hospitals.
“To this end, the government needs to consider giving authority to NMC to play the role of the headquarters,” according to the study. “Only when such a unified public health and medicine service delivery system is established can public hospitals play the role befitting their purposes in the regional health systems that include private hospitals.”