a hospital · South KoreaWooridul Spine Hospital

A single-specialty spine hospital in Cheongdam, Gangnam-gu, Seoul, founded in 1982 by the neurosurgeon Sang-Ho Lee and built entirely around the spine: neurosurgery, orthopaedics and rehabilitation medicine, and nothing else. The state's promotion body lists it at 240 beds and 30 doctors. It opened a department for foreign patients in 2006, three years before the state's own count of foreign patients starts, and was designated an international training centre for two spine-surgery societies in 2001.

The hospital's own milestone list reads as a single specialty widening without ever changing subject. Sangho Lee Neurosurgery Clinic in 1982; Dongrae Wooridul Hospital in 1984; Yeoksam Wooridul in 1992; the Cheongdam headquarters in 1999. The Korean Ministry of Health and Welfare selected it as a specialty hospital in spine diseases in 2005 and again under the formal scheme in 2011.

The foreign practice came from the teaching, not from a marketing department. In 2001 the hospital was designated an international training centre by ISMISS and IMLAS — the minimally invasive spine surgery societies — and in 2002 an international training centre and Korean branch of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons. The Wooridul International Patient Center opened in 2006. Korea's own count of foreign patients begins in 2009, and the Act that governs registration now dates from 2015. Inference — the sequence puts Wooridul among the first Korean hospitals to build a foreign-patient practice, and it built it by training the surgeons who would refer, which is a slower route than an accreditation and a harder one to buy.

Then the hospital went the other way. Shanghai in 2009, Jakarta in 2010, Istanbul and Dubai in 2011, Singapore in 2012. The current site lists two of them — Dubai, inside King's College Hospital London Dubai, and Abu Dhabi — alongside the five Korean sites, and says nothing about the rest; this record notes the difference between the two lists and makes no finding about what happened to the others.

What the Abu Dhabi centre is worth reading closely. Healthpoint describes the Wooridul Spine Center as a partnership between Mubadala Health and the Seoul hospital, wholly owned by Mubadala, staffed by Korean spine surgeons, with its physiotherapists trained in Seoul, and it names the aim: to reduce the need for patients to travel abroad. Inference — that is a branch in the branding sense and an export in the commercial one. The hospital is not exporting a building. It is exporting the surgeon and the training, to a state that would rather buy the operation at home than send the patient and the fee to Korea.

The hospital's own greeting page calls it a "world-class spine hospital". This directory quotes that rather than asserting it, and carries no outcome figure, no complication rate and no volume count for the unit, because none was published on any page read here.

Foreign patients reach it through the International Patient Center opened in 2006. The state's Medical Korea listing names English, Russian and Arabic, western, Korean and halal catering, and direct billing with named international insurers — which is the part that matters to a Gulf patient whose treatment is paid for by somebody else. Trade practice — the Korean shape holds: registration with the ministry, an in-hospital international office, an estimate given on request, and no figure on the public pages.

Nothing is priced on any page read for this record.

As of 17 September 2026 the Korea Health Industry Development Institute's Medical Korea listing carries 240 beds, 30 doctors, KOIHA accreditation and three patient languages for the Hakdong-ro hospital. The hospital's own history page ends its overseas openings in 2012 and its current location list names Dubai and Abu Dhabi. No bed count, no founding figure and no foreign-patient number comes from the hospital itself; the counts here are the state body's.