4,000 New Integrated Care Posts in Korea, and Which Door Social Workers Use

About 4,000 people take up the post in the second half of the year

On October 1, Korea's Ministry of Health and Welfare said that about 4,000 new staff dedicated to integrated community care will be placed in the second half of this year. The same announcement set out a training schedule for the people who will teach them. A total of 489 integrated care officers from 230 cities, counties and districts across the country are being trained in Cheongju in five sessions between September 29 and October 8. Each local government runs job training for its new staff from October to December, timed to its own hiring and placement schedule, and the officers trained in Cheongju serve as instructors.

The post comes from a law. When the Act on Integrated Support for Community Care, including medical and long-term care, took full effect on March 27, 2026, every city, county and district had to set up a dedicated integrated care unit. In a press release the day before, the ministry said it had secured funded positions for 5,346 dedicated staff and that 5,202 had been placed as of March 11. About 90 percent of the staff at city, county and district offices worked on integrated care full time, but most of those at neighborhood offices and public health centers combined it with other duties. The ministry expected the number of full-time staff to rise once new hires were placed through local recruitment from September onward. The roughly 4,000 people placed this half are those new hires.

The work is already piling up. According to the ministry's July 2 update marking 100 days of the program, 46,215 people had applied for integrated care by June 26, and 37,304 of them had been connected to services, receiving 3.3 services each on average. In the same update, local officials raised the growing workload on the staff in charge.

Behind each application come a 58-item assessment and a check every three months

Integrated care is for people aged 65 and over who have trouble keeping up daily life because of frailty, disability or illness and need medical, long-term care and daily support at the same time. People with severe disabilities and high medical needs are also eligible. The officer's work starts when the person or a family member applies at a neighborhood community service center or a National Health Insurance Service branch.

The first step is a preliminary interview about difficulties in daily life to decide whether the person is eligible. If so, staff from the local government and the National Health Insurance Service visit the applicant's home to assess health and living conditions, an assessment that covers daily functioning and health across 58 items. An integrated support meeting of public and private experts then matches the services the person needs with the services available and draws up an individual service plan. The work does not end with the plan. Every three months the officer checks the person's health and service use and revises the plan when the person's condition changes.

The range of services is wide. Home medical visits and dementia care fall under health care, home health visits by public health centers under health management, home care and home nursing under long-term care, and customized elderly care and emergency care under daily living support. Over the first 100 days, daily living support accounted for 43.1 percent of the services connected, followed by health management and prevention at 19.7 percent, long-term care at 12.8 percent, housing welfare at 10.1 percent and health care at 9.1 percent. In its training, the ministry calls this process case management (care management) and names needs assessment, monitoring and individual support planning as the skills new staff must learn.

Social welfare, nursing and public health staff work as one team

This is not a post for social workers alone. When the ministry expanded the pilot program to all 229 cities, counties and districts in September 2025, its program outline called for a dedicated unit (a division or team) at each city, county and district office and for dedicated staff drawn from "welfare, public health and nursing positions, among others." People who passed different exams end up on the same team.

The widest door for social workers is the local civil service exam for the social welfare track, which requires a license from the moment you apply. According to Incheon Metropolitan City's exam guide, applicants for grade 9 social welfare posts need a level 1, 2 or 3 social worker license, and applicants for grade 7 need level 1 or 2. In the same table, grade 8 nursing posts require a nurse or midwife license. Even on the same integrated care team, which exam you take depends on the license you hold.

For students, earning the level 2 social worker license is itself the preparation for this post. If you choose a placement where you can practice case management during the field training that level 2 requires, you can go through needs assessment and individual planning on real cases once before preparing for the exam. For those with a nursing license, the nursing track is another door into the same team.

Judged less by caseload than by time spent living at home

This post is measured in numbers. The ministry has said it will evaluate local governments' performance every year and adjust their funding accordingly. The indicators under consideration for 2026 include securing a dedicated unit and staff and program activity, but also user satisfaction, how long people keep living at home and changes in nursing hospital admission rates. The point is to look not only at how many cases an officer connected but at how long the person stayed at home rather than going to a hospital or care facility.

There are figures behind this. In an evaluation of the pilot program covering 16,294 people from July 2023 to July 2025, participants had a 4.6 percentage point lower rate of admission to long-term care hospitals and a 9.4 percentage point lower rate of entry into care facilities than a control group that did not take part. Among family members and other caregivers of participants, 75.3 percent said their caregiving burden had eased.

Conditions also vary by region. The 100-day review heard that areas with declining populations and areas short of medical services lack medical, long-term care and daily support resources, which makes it hard to provide services. Before applying, check that city, county or district's integrated care service menu on the ministry's integrated care website to get a sense of what the job actually involves there.