Abstract
Although the Health Service has been an object of study for a long time in such fields as Health Economics, Medical Sociology, Politics, Social Welfare, a clear definition concerning the Health Service by those fields appears to be lacking.
The difficulty in defining the health service comes from the uncertainty of the meaning of health. A possible cause of the uncertainty of its definition is the change of meaning attached by society to the pursuit of health.
First, the features of service industries are examined as well as the peculiarities of the Health Service, as the Health Service is an industry which combines both Health and Service.
Next, the different definitions of the Health Service given by researchers are presented in tabular form and their different scopes discussed.
After examining the existing studies of the Health Service, the author presents some issues which have not been resolved because the consumer's viewpoint has not been taken into consideration. In order to establish interdisciplinary study of the Health Service and resolve those issues, the author proposes introducing distribution theory and M. Porter's concept of the Value Chain into health service research.
