hankyoreh

Medical professors at Seoul National University attend an emergency action meeting on Monday in response to the current healthcare crisis involving residents and interns going on strike against government policies. (Yonhap News)

The Korean government has so far notified about 5,000 medical interns and residents that their medical licenses may be suspended. That represents 40% of the trainee doctors who are currently on strike from their hospital duties.

The government is taking procedural steps to punish the striking doctors while maintaining its plan to increase medical school rosters by 2,000 students. However, professors at leading medical schools around Korea are asking the government to change its stance. The emergency action committee of professors at the Seoul National University College of Medicine announced that they will submit their resignations if the government does not make a reasonable proposal for resolving the situation.

“We’re sending out prior notification about administrative penalties to trainee doctors who are in violation of the back-to-work order,” said Chun Byung-wang, head of medical policy at the Ministry of Health and Welfare, during a briefing of the government’s emergency task force on the doctors’ collective action on Monday.

As of Mar. 8, 11,994 (92.9%) of 12,912 trainee doctors at 100 teaching hospitals were boycotting work or had abandoned their contracts. The Ministry of Health and Welfare had sent 4,944 of them notices about their potential suspension by Mar. 8 and is now working on sending out similar notices to the others.

But while the Korean government is urging the trainee doctors to return to work, it still intends to let 2,000 more students into the country’s medical schools.

“We plan to be very lenient to trainee doctors who return to work before the administrative procedures [for their suspension] are complete. Our opinion is that even 2,000 more medical school students wouldn’t be enough to compensate for the speed at which our society is aging and the inadequacy of our essential medical services,” said Health and Welfare Minister Cho Kyoo-hong in an interview on KBS radio on Monday.

However, professors at some of Korea’s leading medical schools are holding emergency meetings and setting up emergency action committees to devise countermeasures to the government’s actions. The professors are hoping to forestall disadvantages that their students may suffer because of the trainee doctors’ collective resignations and medical students’ solidarity boycotts of their studies.
“We’ve decided to submit our resignations on Mar. 18 unless the government takes steps to produce a sincere and reasonable proposal for resolving this situation,” announced an emergency action committee of the faculty association at the Seoul National University (SNU) medical school following an emergency meeting on Monday.

“Resignations would be submitted on an individual basis,” committee chair Pang Jae-seung told reporters after the meeting, while noting that all the professors had agreed to the plan.

The meeting on Monday was reportedly attended by 430 of the professors at the SNU medical school.

The faculty association at the Yonsei University College of Medicine set up an emergency action committee on Monday, and the faculty association at the Sungkyunkwan School of Medicine was planning to convene online on Tuesday to discuss what measures to take.

“More people think their faculty associations should take action if the medical students and trainee doctors are about to suffer irreversible harm,” Kim Chang-soo, president of the Medical Professors Association of Korea (MPAK), told the Hankyoreh.

Currently, medical professors are filling the gaps created by the departure of trainee doctors. But if those professors walk away from their jobs, too, the medical vacuum will only become even bigger.

The Ministry of Health and Welfare assigned 20 military doctors and 138 public health doctors, for a total of 158, to 20 major hospitals to make up for the shortfall in medical care caused by the doctors’ strike. Following their training, the doctors are supposed to take up their new assignments on Wednesday.

In an overture to medical students who are boycotting their classes, Deputy Prime Minister and Education Minister Lee Ju-ho offered Monday to hold talks with the head of the Korean Medical School Association (the KMSA, which represents student bodies at 40 medical schools) with the goal of ending the disruption to medical education. Lee asked the KMSA to give its answer by 6 pm on Wednesday.

In a related story, the Korean Health and Medical Workers' Union and patients’ advocacy groups launched a nationwide petition on Monday calling on the doctors to return to work. Over the next month, the groups intend to collect a million signatures calling on the doctors to stop refusing to treat patients and to quickly restore medical care to normalcy.

By Kim Yoon-ju, Park Go-eun, and Kim Hae-jeong, staff reporters

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