hankyoreh

Doctors protesting the government’s plan to increase the medical school admission cap crowd the streets in Seoul’s Yeouido District on March 3 during a mass rally that the Korean Medical Association says was attended by over 30,000. (Kim Young-won/The Hankyoreh)

Medical residents and interns remained stalwart in their walkout on Sunday, continuing their collective action on the eve of the commencement of government sanctions against those who do not return to the nation’s hospitals. 
 
The government will start identifying those who have not returned to work on Monday and begin administrative and judicial proceedings.
 
Many third- and fourth-year interns and residents have already left their stations, and some medical school professors have expressed their intention to join the collective action if residents and interns face punishments, which could lead to an even bigger health care vacuum in March.
 
“If the illegal vacating of medical sites continues, the government will have no choice but to follow its constitutional and legal duties,” said Prime Minister Han Duck-soo while presiding over a meeting of the Central Disaster and Safety Countermeasures Headquarters on the physicians’ collective action.

“It is not too late for medical residents to return to work,” he said.  
 
The Ministry of Education also sent official documents to 40 universities nationwide on Thursday, before the three-day holiday weekend, asking them to raise the cap on admissions to medical schools, demonstrating that the government intends to push forward with its plan to increase the number of those admitted to medical schools by 2,000 per year starting in the 2025 academic year. 
 
As of Thursday, Feb. 29, a total of 565 residents and interns had returned to work, but the number did not change substantially during the long weekend. 
 
“Medical residents are refusing to return to hospitals, and new interns aren’t signing contracts,” a professor at Chonnam National University Hospital told the Hankyoreh. “Even if the residents receive three-month suspensions of their doctor’s licenses [as the government has announced], they seem to think of this as an opportunity to take a year off, rendering the measures ineffective.”
 
If the government pushes forward with its hard-line tactics to take legal measures against those who do not come back to work, the gaps in care in South Korea’s health care system will only worsen.
 
Third- and fourth-year residents and interns have already begun to depart hospitals since their contracts expired in late February, which may lead fellows and professors in the field to join the collective action.

Sources at Seoul National University Hospital and the Seoul Boramae Medical Center told the Hankyoreh that residents in their third and fourth years have indeed not returned to work after their contracts were up in late February. 

“We’ll have to see what happens tomorrow [March 4], but a considerable number of fellows appear ready to join the collective action,” an official at a tertiary general hospital in the Seoul area told the Hankyoreh. 

In a statement published last month, the Medical Professors Association of Korea had said that it would “respond firmly” to responses by the government, with the faculty at the elite Seoul National University, Yonsei University, and Korea University medical schools expressing similar intentions. 

The government has definitely laid out the legal measures it plans to take. “Whatever may come, we will not bow to collective action that holds Korean lives hostage,” the prime minister said. 

Meanwhile, the emergency leadership committee of the Korean Medical Association organized a mass rally by physicians in Seoul’s Yeouido that day, where those gathered called for the medical school expansion to be withdrawn and the government to walk back its policy package for essential health care. The association estimated that 40,000 were in attendance at the rally that day, while police counted 10,000. 

Speaking to the press at the rally that day, Joo Soo-ho, who serves as the spokesperson for the Korean Medical Association’s interim leadership committee, said, “The administration thinks it has doctors cornered, but we will not stray from the path we have committed to.” 

In regard to this situation, Jeong Hyeong-jun, who oversees policy at the Association of Physicians for Humanism, said, “If the confrontation between the administration and doctors goes on any longer, cancer patients who need to receive chemotherapy on a regular basis will be among some of the first to be negatively affected.” 

For the current impasse to be resolved, Jeong says, “doctors need to withdraw their total rejection of the med school admission cap increase, and the government needs to withdraw its uncompromising adherence to the 2,000-person figure for the increase.”   

By Cheon Ho-sung, staff reporter

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