By Lee Tae-hoon
Staff Reporter
An opposition lawmaker Monday blasted the state-funded Medical Call Center for Foreigners (MCCF) for poor performance.
Rep. Choi Young-hee of the main opposition Democratic Party said the center, which provides services in five foreign languages, had managed to provide consultation to only six foreigners over the past five months.
During the same period, 11 Koreans called the 24-hour hotline to help their foreign friends, while 19 locals used the service on their own behalf.
The center was launched last May in line with the growth of the medical tourism industry here.
Choi said that of the 1.1 million foreigners living in Korea, merely two Americans, one Uzbek and three Japanese contacted the call center.
Consultants specialized in Chinese and Arabic languages didn’t even have a chance to provide consultation to any foreigner.
The MCCF’s five-member staff who offer a 24-hour multilingual service collected pay checks totaling 33 million won ($28,100) in the past three months, according to data provided to Choi. Simply put, the center spent 5.5 million won of taxpayers’ money to provide consultation to each foreign patient, Choi said.
Currently, the service which can be reached at 1577-7129 is listed neither on the call listing of the Health Industry Development Institute (KHIDI), which runs the center, nor on the institute’s Web site.
Yim Yeong-yi, team leader of the MCCF, said the center is planning to launch a Web site in the next five months to raise the awareness of the service among the foreign community.
However, Yim was not aware that a similar consultation service is offered by the Medical Referral Service (MRS), which can be reached at 010-4769-8212 or 010-8750-8212.
In 2008, 774 people called the MRS, which offers medical counseling and answers to inquiries in English to 280,000 foreigners in Seoul.
Another English medical call center is also currently operated by the government-run Emergency Medical Information Center, which can be reached at 1339.
Meanwhile, the KHIDI is planning to conduct a custom satisfaction survey on foreigners about the MCCF’s service with a budget of 30 million won in November.
In this regard, the lawmaker said it would be pointless to spend such a large sum of money to carry out the survey since only six foreigners had used the service.