“Infection control will be the most important factor that decides hospital innovation or management performance.”

Professor Eom Joong-sik of the Infectious Disease Department at Gachon University Gil Medical Center will present “infection control” as a topic at the Hospital Innovation and Patient Experience Conference (HiPex) 2023, organized by the Korean Doctors Weekly, a sister publication of this paper.

At HiPex 2023, which will be held at Myungji Hospital in Goyang, Gyeonggi Province, from April 21 to 23, Professor Eom will discuss hospital innovation with the theme of infection control. As an infection control specialist and a chief planning and coordination official at two university hospitals, his practical experience will provide the basis for his talk.

When told that infection control seems to be far away from hospital innovation in an interview with Korea Biomedical Review Wednesday, Eom said, “No, it’s not.” He said there is no innovation or progress in hospitals with poor infection control.

When Eom visited a European country to benchmark its infection control system a decade ago, the first thing that caught his eye was a cartoon with two helicopters hovering over a hospital. One chopper was labeled “patient safety” and the other “infection control.”

“I understood it to mean that for a hospital to be safe, we had to keep an eye on patient safety and infection control. I never forgot that picture. So I studied and thought about what role I should play in infection control,” Professor Eom said. “And when I worked as the head of the planning and coordination office in two university hospitals, I experienced that the business performance of a hospital could depend on infection control.”

Eom noted that poor infection control can lead to healthcare-associated infections and legal disputes.

"Litigation costs and settlements can wipe out years of hard work, and it's not just a problem for individual hospitals,” he said. “It also leads to deterioration of health insurance finance and increased social costs.”

Eom explained that in foreign countries, various studies have evaluated the socioeconomic cost-effectiveness of infection control. "We need to build infection control infrastructure more aggressively and actively prevent healthcare-associated infections," he added.

In addition, the increasingly shortened cycle of new infectious disease outbreaks has made infection control a necessity, not an option. As a result, government policies are also pushing hospitals to strengthen infection control or face extinction.

“Hospitals that fail to respond to emerging infectious diseases or chronic and perennial healthcare-associated infections will find it difficult to grow," Professor Eom said. “Many hospitals also use digital healthcare voluntarily to strengthen infection control.”

However, there are limitations.

Professor Eom cites the "fundamental problem of the Korean medical system" as a limitation. If the medical system, maintained by "squeezing medical workers,” is not changed, there will be limits no matter how hard the medical community strives.

"This is not a problem that can be solved by organizations or clinical departments that deal primarily with infectious diseases. If you look at countries like Germany that have weathered the Covid-19 pandemic well, they have a strong healthcare system. They could withstand and survive because their healthcare infrastructure was in place. This is not the case in Korea. We are struggling to provide even routine care," Eom said.

Eom emphasized the need to ensure that critical and emergency patients can be treated at any time, even in the face of an outbreak of a new infectious disease.

"It should be a system that doesn't require overtaxing medical workers," Professor Eom said. “Only when the overall healthcare system in Korea is improved and advanced can our ability to respond to emerging infectious diseases be strengthened."