When the Kaohsiung Veterans General Hospital was first established in 1990, the Department of Internal Medicine comprised eleven divisions, including Gastroenterology and Hepatobiliary Medicine, Cardiology, Thoracic Medicine, Metabolism and Endocrinology, Nephrology, Infectious Diseases, Hematology, Allergy-Immunology-Rheumatology, Neurology, Respiratory therapy and Psychiatry. From the establishment until today, the Department made some remarkable milestones.
As the major department, the Kaohsiung Veterans General Hospital passed the national medical center accreditation in 1993. In the same year, Psychiatry division nurtured by the Department was mature to become an independent department.
In 1995, a new Intensive Care Division was established to further improve critical care, and later renamed as the Division of Critical Care Internal Medicine in 2012, which was then incorporated into the Department of Critical Care Medicine due to the organizational structure adjustment.
In 2003, the task-based division of General Internal Medicine was established according to the national health policy aiming at promoting the "Post-Graduate General Medicine Training Program" and improving over-specialization of the health care system, and later become a formal division in 2012.
In 2004, the task-based Geriatric Medical Center was established to improve the quality of medical care for the elderly, which since 2008 became a formal division, the Division of Geriatric Medicine, providing more comprehensive geriatric medical services in response to Taiwan's rapid transition into an aging society. In 2014, it was officially promoted as the Department of Geriatric Medicine.
In 2011, the Division of Respiratory Therapy was merged into the Division of Thoracic Medicine, and a subacute respiratory care center was established to improve the quality of respiratory care and provide integrated respiratory care.
In 2015, to implement the health policy of the Ministry of Health and Welfare "Promotion Plan for the Care System of Specialized General Medical Attending Physicians", the Department of Integrative Medicine was established and dedicated wards were set up. Specialized attending physicians provide integrated medical care to inpatients under reasonable working hours. The purpose of this policy is to enhance patient safety, improve medical quality, reduce the workload of resident physicians and promote the optimal use of medical resources.
As the times change, medical service provided by physicians needs to change in order to better satisfy patients’ needs. The Department of Internal Medicine continues to be committed to providing comprehensive integrated medical services and actively improving patient safety and medical quality. Facing the challenges of Taiwan's aging society and medical system reform, the Department of Internal Medicine has strengthened medical expertise and medical education in the fields of critical care, general medical education, geriatric medicine, and integrative medicine, cultivating outstanding internal medicine physicians, further improving the quality of holistic medical care, and providing more comprehensive and higher-quality medical services.