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A medical worker at a temporary screening center set up in Seoul Plaza on Dec. 21. (Yonhap News)

Even as the South Korean government speeds up efforts to secure 10,000 hospital beds for COVID-19 patients, medical staff complain that there aren’t enough nurses to look after the surging numbers of patients.

As seasoned nurses quit their jobs because of burnout, the medical staff still on the job face the twofold challenge of training new staff while taking on fresh loads of critically ill patients. The government is under fire for a complacent approach that only patches over the shortage of medical workers.

On Dec. 23, the Korean Health and Medical Workers’ Union (KHMWU) held a press conference in Seoul asking disease control authorities to hold emergency meetings with hospital workers.

“Unless extreme measures are taken for the medical personnel who have been stretched to their limits because of COVID-19, the country’s healthcare system will inevitably collapse,” union representatives said.

“[Authorities] are busily increasing the number of hospital beds without doing anything to increase the number of hospital workers. Every individual nurse has just been loaded with more patients,” said KHMWU Chair Na Sun-ja

“We’re turning to agencies to reinforce staff [to cover the worker shortage], but those agency workers still have to be trained, doubling and sometimes tripling the existing workload.”

Nurses on the front lines of COVID-19 treatment point to a gap between the number of hospital beds that authorities claim to have secured and the actual number of available beds. Even when there are vacancies, patients can’t be brought in to fill those beds unless there are nurses to attend to them.

“The government announcements are obsessed with statistics such as ‘1,000 more hospital beds,’ but hospital staff represent a different situation altogether,” said Ahn Su-gyeong, a nurse at the National Medical Center, where she is head of the union’s local chapter.

“The National Medical Center set up 30 temporary beds for treating seriously ill patients and hired 70 experienced nurses to handle those beds. But five of those nurses have already quit [because of overwork].”

Currently, only 60-70, or 10%, of the 550-600 nurses on staff at the National Medical Center are capable of handling extracorporeal membrane oxygenation devices and other specialized medical equipment.

Lee Hyeon-seop, who leads the union’s local chapter at the Gyeonggi Provincial Medical Center Icheon Hospital, took issue with hospitals’ reliance on nursing agencies for their staffing needs. “Nurses assigned from agencies may have their licenses and other certifications, but hospitals don’t know much about their practical expertise until they arrive. Their actual role in the hospital ends up being minimal.”

Given the ongoing shortage of hospital beds, nurses explained, it’s sometimes impossible to transfer patients to other facilities.

“The Seoul area has a joint situation room for handling patient transfers, but sometimes bed assignments are canceled while patients are already in the ambulance, forcing them to wait on the street,” Ahn said.

“When patients take a turn for the worse, they need to be transferred to a different facility. But some of those patients at our hospital have died because there weren’t any hospital beds open [for critically ill patients]. The outcome might have been different if they’d received appropriate treatment [at a more advanced hospital],” Lee said, expressing his frustration.

By Seon Dam-eun, staff reporter

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