The entire world is encountered with social problems such as population decline, lower birth rate, and increase in the aging population. These social backgrounds trigger the concern of people over health care in terms of the preventive aspects. Therefore, to cope with these problems, major developed nations put an emphasis on the importance of the primary medical facilities. However, the awareness of Korean people regarding the primary medical facilities still remain low, even though Korea is one of the fastest aging societies and low birth-rate countries among OECD nations. In the case of domestic medical delivery systems, medical treatment has been divided into three parts; primary care, secondary care, and tertiary care since 1989. Most of all, the purpose of medical delivery systems is to prevent the imbalance of distribution in medical treatment parts, and waste of medical resources. Nonetheless, current medical services in Korea are moving forward to the imbalanced development by increasing the rates of outpatients in University Hospitals and incurring unnecessary medical costs in pursuit of the high-class hospital and the competition of large-scaled hospitals. Therefore, it is necessary to examine the distribution of the primary medical facilities by alleviating the concentration of outpatients in University Hospitals and clearly dividing medical delivery systems.
In this regard, this study conducted a study targeting primary medical facilities, located in 16 administrative districts(dongs) in Jinju-si, one of the small and medium-sized cities with the purpose of primary medical facilities that people should get access to these facilities easily and conveniently for their health care and prevention, as well as health promotion. This study analyzed the characteristics of spatial distribution according to medical treatment parts by utilizing the GIS spatial analysis based on the location data of the primary medical facilities and found vulnerable areas with a view to reducing the gap between regions and providing equal health care services.
As a result, it was demonstrated that the numerical rates of medical treatment parts were not balanced and dental clinics and Oriental Medicine Hospitals accounted for 59 % of the entire primary medical facilities. Pediatrics and orthopedics were concentrated on residential areas, while other medical parts were concentrated on Jungang-dong, which is the central business area. The part of plastic surgery took up the biggest area in the local area which were out of the influence of medical treatment according to medical treatment parts, which was followed by Obstetrics ＆ Gynecology. In addition, this phenomenon was more distinctive in required medical treatment parts than in non-required medical treatment parts. This shows that there would be a problem in the primary medical services. The analysis results of medical treatment parts based on the nearest neighbor index and cohesion index revealed that all medical treatment parts had clustered patterns. In particular, the clustering degree of the plastic surgery and ophthalmology was the highest. This shows that medical facilities according to Dongs were distributed in certain areas (central commercial areas), revealing the imbalance of medical facilities. In addition, in terms of the correlation between the location of primary medical facilities and customers, the correlation coefficient of Oriental Medical Clinics was the highest with 0.683, while other medical clinics showed a low value of correlation coefficient, revealing that the distribution of customers was not considered. Besides, the administrative boundary of Jinju-si became wider due to the urban-rural integration. However, medical facilities were still distributed in the old parts of the city. Therefore, in the case of getting access to the downtown area of Jinju-si, the analysis results of accessibility which considers Myeon show that it would take 25 minutes on average from Myeon to the downtown area of Jinju-si, while it would take 17 minutes on average from Myeon to each medical treatment part. This imbalance in primary medical facilities was a problem. In particular, blind spots in medical services in Dongs became a more serious problem, when target areas were expanded into Myeon. Therefore, to provide primary medical care services in consideration of customers, it is judged that the findings of this study will be effectively utilized in finding medical facility locations.