South Korea yesterday said that it had started procedures to suspend the medical licenses of 4,900 junior doctors who have resigned and stopped working to protest government medical training reforms, causing healthcare chaos.
The walkout, which started on Feb. 20, is over government plans to sharply increase the number of doctors, which it says is essential to combat shortages and serve South Korea’s rapidly aging population. Medics argue the increase would erode service quality.
Nearly 12,000 junior doctors — 93 percent of the trainee workforce — were not in their hospitals at the last count, despite government back-to-work orders and threats of legal action, forcing Seoul to mobilize military medics and millions of dollars in state reserves to ease the situation.
Photo: Reuters
The South Korean Ministry of Health and Welfare yesterday said that it had sent administrative notifications — the first step toward suspending medical licenses — to thousands of trainee doctors after they defied specific orders telling them to return to their hospitals.
“As of March 8 [notifications] have been sent to more than 4,900 trainee doctors,” Health and Medical Policy Division Director Chun Byung-wang told reporters.
The government has previously warned striking doctors that they face a three-month suspension of their licenses, a punishment it says would delay by at least a year their ability to qualify as specialists.
Chun urged the striking medics to return to their patients.
“The government will take into account the circumstance and protect trainee doctors if they return to work before the administrative measure is complete,” he said, adding that doctors who return to work now could avoid the punishment.
“The government will not give up dialogue. The door for dialogue is always open... The government will respect and listen to opinions of the medical community as a companion for the medical reforms,” he said.
The government last week announced new measures to improve pay and conditions for trainee medics, plus a review of the continuous 36-hour work period, which is a major gripe of junior doctors.
The strikes have led to surgery cancelations, long wait times and delayed treatments at major hospitals.
Seoul has denied that there is a full-blown healthcare crisis, but Chun said that military doctors would start working in civilian hospitals from tomorrow.
The government is pushing to admit 2,000 more students to medical schools annually from next year to address what it calls one of the lowest doctor-to-population ratios among developed nations.
Doctors say they fear the reform would erode the quality of service and medical education, but proponents accuse medics of trying to safeguard their salaries and social status.
Under South Korean law, doctors are restricted from striking and the ministry has asked police to investigate people connected to the work stoppage.
The plan enjoys broad public support, but a new poll by local media found that 34 percent of people believe the warring sides should start negotiating properly.
RIGHTS FEARS: A protester said Beijing would use the embassy to catch and send Hong Kongers to China, while a lawmaker said Chinese agents had threatened Britons Hundreds of demonstrators on Saturday protested at a site earmarked for Beijing’s controversial new embassy in London over human rights and security concerns. The new embassy — if approved by the British government — would be the “biggest Chinese embassy in Europe,” one lawmaker said earlier. Protester Iona Boswell, a 40-year-old social worker, said there was “no need for a mega embassy here” and that she believed it would be used to facilitate the “harassment of dissidents.” China has for several years been trying to relocate its embassy, currently in the British capital’s upmarket Marylebone district, to the sprawling historic site in the
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
French police on Monday arrested a man in his 20s on suspicion of murder after an 11-year-old girl was found dead in a wood south of Paris over the weekend in a killing that sparked shock and a massive search for clues. The girl, named as Louise, was found stabbed to death in the Essonne region south of Paris in the night of Friday to Saturday, police said. She had been missing since leaving school on Friday afternoon and was found just a few hundred meters from her school. A police source, who asked not to be named, said that she had been
BACK TO BATTLE: North Korean soldiers have returned to the front lines in Russia’s Kursk region after earlier reports that Moscow had withdrawn them following heavy losses Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Friday pored over a once-classified map of vast deposits of rare earths and other critical minerals as part of a push to appeal to US President Donald Trump’s penchant for a deal. The US president, whose administration is pressing for a rapid end to Ukraine’s war with Russia, on Monday said he wanted Ukraine to supply the US with rare earths and other minerals in return for financially supporting its war effort. “If we are talking about a deal, then let’s do a deal, we are only for it,” Zelenskiy said, emphasizing Ukraine’s need for security guarantees