응급의료에 관한 법적고찰

Abstract

With the establishment of regulations on the emergency medical service in 1994, the emergency medical service system in Korea focused on the systems and operations including (i) readjustment of emergency medical service system, (ii) roles of emergency patients information center and (iii) training of emergency medical technicians and emergency medical service fund raising. Nevertheless, the infrastructure(hardware) of emergency medical service is very demanded including the preventable death rate that is still higher than other advanced countries as well as the quite insufficient emergency medical service workers and the regional unbalance of emergency medical service institutions. In addition, even though we consider the special working conditions of the emergency medical service workers for the emergency patients, we should improve the poor medical service environment that we can do simply by changing the awareness of the medical service workers in the aspect of service for the people, for example, insincere duty of explanation and negligence of duty of caution for transfer to other hospitals. To this end, it is prerequisite to provide the in-depth education on the medical practitioners’ duty of cautions including the duty of transfer to other hospitals and informed consent from the medical specialist courses. Meanwhile, the emergency medical service act declares that all people have the right to have the emergency medical service without any prejudice on the gender, age, race, religion, social position or financial status. However, the emergency medical service in Korea brings a double whammy to the people, low quality and difficult access to the emergency medical service and inefficient transfer system of emergency patients. In particular, the government should set the system to provide the emergency medical service of high quality to the people by intensively promoting and systematically reorganizing the emergency medical service institutions, for example, related to the insufficient function of emergency medical service information center guiding the emergency patients to the proper emergency medical service centers in consideration of the treatment ability of each emergency medical service center including the symptoms and seriousness of disease of patients.