Abstract ▼ AI-Helper

Established by the government in all provinces, national university hospitals in Korea represent and also lead the medical institutions of their local regions. Two of their major functions as medical institutes are educating and training health workers, and conducting clinical research on rare or da...

Established by the government in all provinces, national university hospitals in Korea represent and also lead the medical institutions of their local regions. Two of their major functions as medical institutes are educating and training health workers, and conducting clinical research on rare or dangerous epidemic diseases that private hospitals are often not willing to investigate. They are also financially independent corporate hospitals that have to finance themselves without assistance from the government. A public corporate organization has the burden of maintaining satisfactory profitability while also performing their public function. Generally, the profitability and public function of an organization are considered mutually exclusive. Increasing profitability tends to result in weakened public function, and strengthening public function often results in the decrease of profitability. National university hospitals are no exceptions to this dilemma. One of the difficulties that national university hospitals are now facing is caused by their past management policies excessively pursuing profit-making. Their public function has been weakened considerably as a result. This study looked into this problem and investigated ways in which national university hospitals can maintain good balance between their profitability and public function.