earticle

영어

Medical tourism is a tourism activity along with medical treatment and recuperation, and its’ cost is relatively less compared to that undeveloped countries. Also, medical tourism has shown a meteoric rise in Asian country, where there are a large number of tourism and recreational facilities and an advanced level of medical services. From the demographic aspect, China is an important market in this area since it is geographically close to South Korea. Therefore, this study attempted to assess the awareness regarding medical tourism among Chinese subjects. A self-administered questionnaire survey targeting the employees in their 20s and 30s who worked for a local Chinese company was performed in this study. A questionnaire was written in Korean initially, and then it was translated into Chinese by an employee who spoke both Chinese and Korean. One hundred thirty copies of the questionnaire were distributed, and it took approximately two weeks to collect the data. Among them, only the results of questionnaires completed by 121 participants were analyzed as they understood the purpose of the study and agreed to participate in this study. On analyzing the questionnaires by using SPSS19.0 Win program, it was confirmed that the participants included 39 males (32.2%) and 82 females (67.8%) who were young people. Also, 79 participants (65.3%) were in their 20s and 42 participants (34.7%) were in their 30s. On analyzing the most preferred country as a medical tourism destination, 38 females (40.9%) responded that they would prefer to visit South Korea the most whereas 19males (38.8%) replied that Japan was their most preferred country. Also, ‘safety’ was considered the most important factor when choosing the country for medical tourism. Besides, on analysis with the t-test regarding desired countries for medical tourism, a difference was observed between genders.