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The global environmental changes, such as an increase in the average national income and an aging population worldwide, have caused people to move from country to country to meet various health needs through advanced transportation and communication (Cho, 2015). This phenomenon promotes convergence of medical services and tourism services, and according to a market research firm Global View Research, the global medical tourism market is expected to grow at an annual average rate of 20 percent to 131.35 billion dollars by 2022 (Korea Health Industry Development Institute, 2019).
Korea ranks 19th among 34 OECD countries in terms of medical tourism quality competitiveness, ranking second in the facility equipment sector, fourth in the medical service sector, and ninth in the medical technology level, while having relatively high quality competitiveness in the medical tourism industry among all member countries, the human resources level was ranked 31st, and the issue of fostering medical tourism professionals and capacity building is a national task that needs to be addressed urgently (Huh et al., 2013).
Leading countries (e.g., Singapore, India, Thailand) in medical tourism also share a common feature that emphasizes the importance of human resources to provide interpretation services to the extent that there is no problem with full communication with overseas patients (Kang et al., 2008).
For the successful development of the medical tourism industry, expanding the hardware sector, such as medical institutions and facilities, is important, but the importance of the role of medical tourism workers in providing contact services to overseas patients is the key from the perspective of the service industry (Kim, 2015). In addition, continuing efforts and management to foster human resources will be important because these human resources can only be obtained over a certain period of time, rather than through the physical resources available in a short period of time, such as technology, facilities and funds. However, due to the short-term development of the medical tourism industry, Korea lacks educational institutions and educational programs that are responsible for the composition of professional human resources and professional vocational education. In addition, research activities related to medical tourism education are very insufficient. Therefore, at a time when the Korean medical tourism industry is now in a period of growth, the evaluation process of medical tourism human resources development education services is required to identify problems in the current education service and seek improvements at the same time.
The purpose of this study is to provide strategic and practical implications for improving the quality of medical tourism education service by measuring the quality of medical tourism education service from the perspective of students and experts, and comparing and analyzing the results.
In this study, the following tasks are to be carried out for this purpose.
First, through prior research and gathering of opinions from academic experts, education service quality component factors are derived considering the characteristics of medical tourism education.
Second, the explicit importance and implicit importance of the component factors of education service quality are measured by applying the revised IPA technique to the students.
Third, the AHP analysis is applied to academia and industry experts in medical tourism industry concerned to derive relative importance through calculating the weight of the component factors of education service quality.
Fourth, by comparing and analyzing the results of the revised IPA and AHP analysis, differences in perception of importance are found, and specific directions for improving the quality of education services are presented through the cause identification of differences.