South Korea Medical Tourism Diary. Part 5: Ajou University Hospital

Continued from Part 4: Wooridul Spine Hospital

November 28, 2007

On my second day in Korea we started our tour at the Ajou University Medical Center, a 1000+ bed teaching hospital that was buzzing with activity. I took very few pictures, mainly because there always seemed to be patients around. The environment reminded me very much of a large US teaching hospital. Ajou is located in Suwon, a part of the country that has been growing rapidly. As a result the hospital is bursting at the seams and hoping to boost its inpatient capacity by about 60 percent over the next few years. My impression is that the main constraint for Ajou in growth of the medical tourism business is simply a lack of space.

We met a wide variety of US-trained physicians whose level of English and understanding of American patients was excellent. Ajou is located relatively close to the American air force base at Osan and acts as a tertiary care referral center for them. Ajou is used to receiving referrals of complex cases from the US military and coordinating their care with American physicians. Of course the US military brings with it a large number of civilian contractors, and Ajou is serving that market, too. While touring the 13th floor, where the foreign patients stay, we encountered an American contractor from Texas, who was preparing to go in to surgery. He described the hospital as comparable to hospitals he's been in in Texas, "notwithstanding the language and cultural barriers."

The hospital keeps track of its growing international business. In 2005 there were 5566 foreign outpatients and 221 inpatients. In 2006 the numbers had risen to 7239 and 320 respectively. (Possibly they are counting visits, not patients, but I forgot to ask.) Of this number, the vast majority are expats. Only about 1% are classic medical tourists who journeyed to Korea specifically to go to hospitals there. Many of the patients are Americans but they also serve a relatively large number of patients from Mongolia, Russia and China.

The international patient center was large and busy. Four nurse coordinators work there and they are overseen by a senior physician, who is on call for them. The patient center displayed a certificate of appreciation from the US Army, dated March 2007.

A nice touch at Ajou, which we also saw elsewhere in Korea, is the practice of posting outside each patient room a photo of the nurse on duty along with her name.

We had a lovely lunch, where we were introduced to senior professors who'd all spent significant time in the US. We learned that --like in the US-- a high percentage of total spending occurs in the last weeks and days before death. Apparently there is no concept of "brain death," only cardiac death counts. We were told that some Americans whose families wanted to take them off life support had to go back to the US military base to do so, otherwise it would have been considered murder. That sounds like something to be taken into consideration for prospective medical tourists.

At Ajou and other hospitals around Korea we noted that the number of nurses relative to physicians and beds was lower than what we might expect. For example, Ajou has 905 nurses and 1033 beds. One reason is that relatives in Korea are expected to do many of the chores nurses would typically do in the US or elsewhere. Medical tourists should probably count on hiring an assistant to do some of those tasks. It's typical to have such assistants in Korea and the hospital can help procure them.

Ajou was kind enough to allow me to post their overview presentation, where you will find statistics and additional information.

See Part 6: Hanyang University Medical Center and trip to Busan