Daegu Metropolitan City - The 'Daegu Global Medical Tourism' project to be promoted by a consortium of 12 organizations, including Daegu City and Kyungpook National University Hospital, was selected as one of the '2011 Regional Excellent Medical Tech Cultivation Support Projects' of the Ministry of Health & Welfare (MOHW) to invigorate attraction of patients from around the world.
The selection is expected to serve as a trigger for Daegu's medical tourism promotional activities ahead of the IAAF World Championships to held August 27 ~ September 4 in the city.
The ministry's public solicitation projects were promoted with the aim to identify regionally specialized medical technologies, improve infrastructures, strengthen marketing through national budget support and prepare the foundation to stimulate the nation's international medical service industry.
Among the projects filed by 11 provinces and cities nationwide, six projects, including 'Global Medical Tourism City Daegu,' were finally selected by the ministry on April 18 after undergoing an initial screening on April 8 and second screening on April 12.
Daegu City filed an application for the projects with hair transplantation as its regional core technology and promotion of medical tourism marketing through its consortium with 11 regional hospitals with excellent technologies as the main thrust.
To promote the project, Daegu plans to expand medical tourism infrastructures, including establishment of a one-stop service support center and training of medical tourism interpreters, with a city budget of 300 million won and conduct marketing in conjunction with publicity for the 2011 IAAF World Championships and 'Visit Daegu Year 2011' events.
At present, Daegu provides a one-stop guide service for patients visiting the city from abroad through a medical tourism support center established within EXCO, but intends to expand its functions in the future. It also plans to study ways of adding Arabian language to the homepage of Daegu Metropolitan Medical Tourism Information System, which is now operated in English, Japanese and Chinese as well as Korean.
In the second half of this year, in particular, the city plans to publish a Daegu medical tourism guide map and guidebook, while encouraging and inducing use of multiple languages on signboards and signs at medical tourism-registered hospitals, etc.
A related city official said, "The 'Creation of Global Medical City, Daegu,' which was selected as a project to receive national budget support, will contribute significantly to the growth of Daegu into a representative medical brand of Korea in the future and to the development of its regional medical services as well as medical industries."
Medical tourism (global health care) is a flagship high value-added industry that the central government has selected as one of 17 new growth engines and is intensively nurturing. Due to the longer stay period and higher revenues than general tourism, medical tourism is known to have excellent production inducement and job creation effects.
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