2016, Vol.19, No.1

Korean Journal of Medical Ethics 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 1.21

pISSN : 2005-8284 / eISSN : 2234-3598
https://journal.kci.go.kr/medethics

The purpose of this study was to assess parents’ understanding of, and satisfaction with, the explanations provided by researchers conducting pediatric clinical trials. Self-report questionnaires were collected from forty one parents of children treated at a national university hospital in South Korea. A Mann-Whitney U test, Kruskal-Wallis test, and Spearman correlation test were performed on the collected data using SPSS Statistics 20.0. The mean for understanding was 71.1 points out of 100. The item that was best understood was collective benefit (84.3 points); the item that was least understood was compensation for risk (40.9 points). The predictors of understanding were the explanation time of the researcher (p=.045) and the feelings of difficulty with the researcher’s explanation (p=.033). The mean for explanation satisfaction was 73.6 points and was related to understanding (p<.001). The results of this study suggest that researchers in pediatric clinical trials should identify items that parents are likely to find difficult to understand, spend sufficient time explaining procedures to parents, and match the level of the explanations they offered to individual parents’ general level of understanding.

On December 18, 2015, South Korea’s Ministry of Health and Welfare formally approved the establishment of Korea’s first corporate-owned for-profit hospital. The establishment of this hospital, which will be named Greenland International Hospital (GIH), raises two distinct but overlapping sets of ethical concerns. One set of concerns relates to the fact that GIH will be engaged in for-profit medicine, which some believe is incompatible with the ethical principles that are thought to govern medical practice. The second set of ethical concerns relates to the fact that GIH is being established in an effort to further develop Korea’s burgeoning industry in medical tourism, an industry that has recently attracted academic interest in light of the ethical concerns that it raises. In this paper I draw on some of the existing literature concerning the ethics of for-profit medicine and medical tourism in an attempt to shed light on the ethical issues involved in the recent decision by the South Korean government to approve the establishment of GIH.

In recent years surrogacy services in Korea, with increasing infertility as well as high quality Assisted Reproductive Technology, have emerged as serious problems. The Korea’s Bioethics and Safety Act on surrogacy bans illegal acts that provide or use an embryo, ovum or spermatozoon for money or act as broker for providing or using them. Since 2012, the Korea National Institute for Bioethics Policy (KoNIBP) performed online monitoring about these illegal acts by capturing the information and submitted the list of them to the Ministry of Health and Welfare to delete the posts. After the correction order, the number of illegal cases steadily declined from 2,025 illegal cases in 2012 to 748 cases in 2015 (decrease of nearly 4 cases per month). However, under current law, it is hard to regulate all improper behaviors from who seek or provide surrogacy services and this law is in dire need of reform. We call for legislation that regulates inappropriate surrogacy arrangement on a commercial basis. Furthermore, we also have an urgent need of social consensus involving parents, professionals and surrogate mother or father.