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A person in scrubs walks down the hallways at a university hospital in Seoul on March 6, 2024, day 16 of the collective walkout by thousands of the nation’s interns and residents. (Yonhap)

To fill the vacuum left by the mass resignations of medical residents and interns protesting government policies, South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol has declared his intentions to utilize physician assistants (PAs) to treat critical patients in major hospitals. 

PAs, known commonly in Korea as PA nurses, often perform the duties of a doctor in the field but are not protected by the laws that guarantee the rights of licensed medical doctors, which leaves them in legal limbo. Yoon has pledged an expenditure of 128.5 billion won (US$96.7 million) to subsidize the hiring of additional medical personnel, and to dispatch public health doctors and military medical officers to hospitals suffering critical staff shortages. 

Presiding over a meeting of the Central Disaster and Safety Countermeasures Headquarters on Wednesday, Yoon pledged to “administratively discipline doctors who have betrayed their duty and endangered the lives of patients while strengthening the nation’s emergency healthcare system to fill the current medical vacuum.” 

“We also need to provide a legal framework that will protect nurses when they need to fill the void when doctors aren’t readily available,” he said. 

The Ministry of Health and Welfare is expected to draft legal guidelines that specifically outline the duties that PAs can perform legally and distribute them to hospitals as early as Friday. The intent is to prevent PAs from facing legal repercussions for performing the duties of a medical resident or intern in an urgent situation. 

Current laws dictate that nurses must perform duties under doctor supervision, but the laws concerning PAs are ambiguous. The Korean Medical Association (KMA) opposes a legal framework that would allow PAs to perform the duties of medical doctors, yet the president is directly intervening against their wishes. A legal and policy framework dictating the professional spectrum of PAs is likely to be included in a future amendment of the Medical Service Act. 

On Wednesday, the government announced emergency health care measures to respond to the mass resignations of medical residents and interns. During a Cabinet meeting, the administration approved an emergency fund of 128.5 billion won (US$96.7 million) to finance the measures. The funds will be used to subsidize labor costs (58 billion won, or US$43.6 million) for medical fellows and professors who are filling the vacuum left by the residents and interns. They will also cover operational costs for public hospitals and provincial medical centers that have extended their weekday and weekend hours while canceling their days off (39.3 billion won, or US$29.5 million). 

The state will also dispatch 150 public health doctors and 20 medically licensed military surgeons to hospitals with severe personnel shortages (5.9 billion won, or US$4.4 million). They will mostly be sent to hospitals attached to their alma mater or the hospitals where residents and interns were training. 

The state will also call on medical institutions nationwide to cooperate in a plan to distribute non-critical patients from the country’s top hospitals to less crowded ones (4 billion won, or US$3 million)

Yet some medical fellows and professors have joined the mass resignation movement to protest government policies. If that trend continues, the state’s emergency health care system will be insufficient to fill the current vacuum in medical care. 

By Cheon Ho-sung, staff reporter; Lim Jae-hee, staff reporter; Kim Yoon-ju, staff reporter

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