clinic
The rooms
Examination, operating and recovery on one floor
There is not much to say about a clinic that a patient cannot see for themselves in the first ten minutes. What is worth setting down is the part that is not visible from the waiting room: where it is, what is on the floor, when it is open, and which instruments the clinic’s own material says it uses. Everything else on this page has been left out because it is not verified.
01Where it is
The address is 9F, 138 Dosan-daero, Gangnam-gu, Seoul. Dosan-daero runs east and west through the southern half of the city, and takes its name from Dosan, the pen name of the independence activist An Chang-ho. The district around it is the part of Seoul where most of the country’s plastic surgery is concentrated, which matters to a patient for one reason only: a second opinion, an ophthalmologist, a dermatologist or a hospital is not far away when one is needed.
The clinic is registered as UVOM Plastic Surgery Clinic and has two directors, Dr. Jung Su Lee and Dr. Chang Min Kang. The main line is 02-545-3700, the fax 02-545-0475, and the email address uvom@uvom.com.
02One floor
Examination, imaging, operating and recovery all take place on the same floor. It sounds like a detail of the lease and it is not. It changes three things that a patient actually experiences.
The first is the distance between a finding and a decision. Where a patient is examined, scanned and then seen again in the same set of rooms, the ultrasound is done during the consultation rather than booked for another day, and what is found on the screen is discussed while the person who examined the face is still in the room. Assessment of injected material depends on putting two things together, what the hand feels and what the probe shows, and they are most useful in the same half hour.
The second is the day of surgery itself. A patient walks from a consulting room to a theatre and afterwards to a recovery room without leaving the floor, without a transfer between buildings, and without appearing in a public lobby with a dressed face. For under-eye and facial work, where bruising is conspicuous and the person is self-conscious about being seen, that is not a small thing.
The third is continuity in the days afterwards. Post-operative review, suture removal and any problem that arises happen in the same place, with the same staff, and with the operating surgeon a short distance away rather than in another building or another diary.
03What it is, and what it is not
UVOM is registered as a clinic rather than as a hospital. In Korea that is a legal category with a defined meaning and not a statement about quality, but it does set a boundary, and the boundary is worth knowing before a consultation rather than after one. What can be done here is what can be done properly in a day-case setting with the resources of a single floor.
That boundary is part of the assessment. Where a case needs the resources of a general hospital, because of the extent of the surgery, the anaesthetic required, or a medical condition that has to be managed alongside it, the correct course is to say so at consultation and to arrange it elsewhere rather than to attempt it here. The clinic’s own outreach record contains exactly that arrangement: patients invited from abroad whose operations required a university hospital were supported into one rather than treated on this floor.
04The instruments the clinic names
Two are named in UVOM’s own material, and only those two are described here.
Ultrasound
The clinic states that ultrasound assessment is carried out before surgery as a standing part of its process, and describes it as what makes a more detailed and safer operation possible. For foreign body work that is the central instrument rather than an addition. It shows the plane a material sits in and how deep it is, whether it is a discrete nodule or spread out, whether inflammation is active around it, and where it lies in relation to normal fat and to the structures that have to be preserved. It is done with the patient in the room, in real time, and the face can be moved while it is being scanned, which a static image cannot reproduce.
What it does not do is name the product. No ultrasound appearance identifies a brand, and the clinic’s stated protocol is to tell patients so rather than to imply otherwise.
CT
CT is used where bone is part of the question: previous contouring surgery and where the cut lines actually are, erosion of bone beneath an implant that has been in place for years, the position and projection of the malar complex, and the state of the forehead where an implant is to be removed. The clinic describes using CT to anticipate, for example, how hollow a forehead is likely to look once an implant is out, and taking that into the consultation rather than leaving it to be discovered afterwards.
Not every patient needs it. Where the problem is soft tissue alone, ultrasound answers the question and CT adds a dose of radiation without adding information.
05When it is open
Consulting hours are 09:00 to 19:00 on Monday, Wednesday and Friday; 09:00 to 21:00 on Tuesday and Thursday; and 09:00 to 16:00 on Saturday. The clinic is closed on Sundays and on public holidays.
The two late evenings and the Saturday morning exist for people who cannot take a working day off, and they are worth knowing about before assuming that an assessment requires leave. Korean public holidays include several that move with the lunar calendar, so an overseas patient planning a trip should confirm the dates rather than work from a fixed list, and should allow for the fact that the days around the two major holidays are quiet across the whole country.
- UVOM Plastic Surgery
- Address
- 9F, 138 Dosan-daero, Gangnam-gu, Seoul, Republic of Korea
- Main line
- 02-545-3700 (+82 2 545 3700 from outside Korea)
- Fax
- 02-545-0475
- uvom@uvom.com
- KakaoTalk channel
- pf.kakao.com/_IzMzE
- Monday, Wednesday, Friday
- 09:00 to 19:00
- Tuesday, Thursday
- 09:00 to 21:00
- Saturday
- 09:00 to 16:00
- Sunday and public holidays
- Closed
- Directors
- Dr. Jung Su Lee and Dr. Chang Min Kang