National Medical Center Secures All Beds Dedicated to COVID-19 Care

Seoul Jung-gu National Medical Center COVID-19 Screening Clinic / Photo by Moon Honam munonam@

[Asia Economy Reporter Chunhee Lee] The National Medical Center announced on the morning of the 21st that it held an emergency meeting and decided to evacuate all beds to secure dedicated infectious disease beds for COVID-19 critical patients.

Through this, the National Medical Center plans to convert all beds in the Emergency Medical Center, Trauma Center including the Trauma Intensive Care Unit, Central Vaccination Center, Hospice Ward, and non-COVID-19 Intensive Care Units into 300 dedicated infectious disease beds for severe and moderate COVID-19 patients. Additionally, the center will operate special medical services such as dialysis, childbirth, and surgery for confirmed COVID-19 patients, fulfilling its responsibilities during the national health care crisis.

Along with this, the National Medical Center stated, "For these functions to operate swiftly on the ground, active government support is required for transferring currently admitted trauma intensive care patients, non-COVID-19 critical patients, and vulnerable patients to other medical institutions, as well as for supporting medical personnel capable of treating COVID-19 patients. Furthermore, simply increasing the number of beds cannot be a solution for the long-term and intermittent epidemic situations, so urgent legal, institutional, and ethical considerations by the central government appropriate for crisis medical response are desperately needed."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.