Saturday 15 / February / 2025
SEOUL: South Korean doctors and trainee doctors have protested for the past month against the expanded public healthcare services, including the increased number of medical students and the establishment of public medical schools, amid the COVID-19 resurgence here.
A group of doctors on a residency program refused to treat patients and staged a rally on Aug. 7, followed by the "general strike" on Aug. 14 in which tens of thousands of doctors, doctor trainees and medical students participated. Indefinite refusal to treat patients by interns, residents and clinical fellows came gradually from August 21.
The ruling Democratic Party agreed last week with the Korean Medical Association (KMA), with which every doctor here is required to register as a member, to consult on the government's four medical reform policies from the very "starting point." The reform policies require parliamentary approval for legislation.
The Korean Intern Resident Association (KIRA), which represents over 16,000 interns and residents training in South Korea, decided Monday to return to work from Tuesday, but concerns remained over the resumed collective action by doctors and trainee doctors who have strongly protested against the expanded public healthcare services.
The government announced reform policies to increase the number of medical students by up to 4,000, or 400 per year, for the next 10 years, while launching public medical schools to train public health doctors. The reform policies include the insurance coverage of oriental medicine and the introduction of telemedicine.
The KMA said in a statement that South Korea is "not short on doctors" but has a "very high accessibility to health care services," noting that public medical schools will raise the economic burden of all taxpayers as the schools will be funded solely by taxes.
The number of doctors here is growing at a 2.4-percent rate near the top of all OECD member countries, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) data cited by the KMA. Every South Korean is able to see doctors 16.6 times per year on average, which is on the top of OECD countries, the KMA said.
However, the same OECD data cited by the nonprofit Association of Physicians for Humanism showed it differently. The number of South Korean doctors per 1,000 people was 2.34 as of 2017, about 58 percent of the OECD average at 3.42 per 1,000 people.
The number of doctors per 1,000 people here recorded an annual average growth rate of 4.2 percent between 2005 and 2009, before skidding to 2.0 percent during the 2013-2017 period. The average growth rate for OECD countries accelerated from 0.4 percent to 1.6 percent in the same period.
The South Korean government planned to lift the quota of medical school admissions, which has been fixed for the past 14 years, to better prepare for public health crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, and to eventually address chronic problems including the regional imbalance in healthcare and the lack of doctors in internal medicine, general surgery, pediatrics, and obstetrics and gynecology.
Physicians, recruited under the government scheme, will be required to perform compulsory services in designated rural areas for 10 years. According to the Association of Physicians for Humanism, the number of doctors in capital Seoul per 1,000 people was 3.1, far higher than 1.4 in North Gyeongsang province.
Public calls mounted for the expanded public healthcare services to tackle potential public health crises as well as the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic, which stoked a cross-border action to jointly develop and produce vaccines and treatment for the virus.
Running counter to the global trend, South Korean doctors and trainee doctors refused to treat patients when the COVID-19 resurgence occurred in August. The number of confirmed COVID-19 cases here stayed below 200 for five straight days, but it continued to grow in triple digits since Aug. 14.
"For the same cost, or even lower cost (for more medical students and the launch of public medical schools), there are many ways to improve the medical services of the rural area and increase the salaries of doctors with unpopular specialties," the KMA said.
The income of South Korean doctors is five to six times higher than the one for workers in urban areas, according to the local civic group People's Solidarity for Participatory Democracy.
