South Korea suspends the licenses of physicians on strike because they won’t stop their walkouts

After striking junior physicians in South Korea for many days without meeting a deadline, the government started the process of suspending their medical licenses on Monday. The walkouts had a negative influence on hospital operations.

For the last two weeks, around 9,000 medical interns and residents have gone on strike in opposition to a government initiative to drastically raise the number of medical school admissions. Their actions have resulted in hundreds of operations and other procedures being postponed, posing a danger to the nation’s healthcare system.

Vice Health Minister Park Min-soo said at a conference on Monday that the government had started the process of suspending the physicians’ licenses for a minimum of three months and that authorities had been sent to dozens of hospitals to officially establish their absence.

Park said that the striking physicians would be informed later by the authorities of their anticipated license suspensions and given an opportunity to reply. He implied that it would take many weeks for the license suspensions to take effect.

“The number of trainee physicians returning to work is quite small, despite repeated requests from the government and various sectors of society. We start the on-site inspection process today as part of the law’s implementation,” Park said.

Park restated the government’s demand that the physicians put off their walkouts.

He remarked, “We once more fervently implore them to return to patients by not ignoring the suffering of patients who are on the verge of death—and their families.”

The government of South Korea had already mandated that the striking physicians report back to work by February 29. Under the country’s medical legislation, the government may force physicians back to work when it determines that there are serious hazards to the public’s health. Refusing to comply with these directives may result in a license suspension lasting up to a year, three years in jail, or a fine of 30 million won, or around $22,500.

The South Korean government said this month that it will increase the ceiling on medical school enrollment from the current 3,058 students to 2,000 beginning in 2019. More doctors are desperately needed, according to officials, to handle the rapidly aging population, address the physician shortage in rural regions, and staff critical but low-paying specialties like emergency rooms and pediatrics.

According to officials, South Korea has one of the lowest rates of doctors per 100,000 people among affluent nations.

However, a lot of physicians are against the proposal, claiming that colleges cannot provide such a sudden surge in pupils with a high-quality education. They further claim that by increasing competition, which would result in overtreatment, the number of additional physicians will raise public health costs. Additionally, they project that recently admitted students would want to work in well-liked, lucrative fields like dermatology and cosmetic surgery.

Many physicians, according to critics, are against the government proposal because they fear that their salary would go down if additional doctors are added.

Only a tiny portion of the 140,000 physicians in the nation are striking, including the younger doctors. However, in several large hospitals, where they work alongside older physicians while undergoing training, they make up 30–40% of all doctors.

Senior physicians have supported the younger doctors with several public demonstrations, but they have not participated in their walkouts. Five senior members of the Korea Medical Association, a group that advocates for South Korean physicians, were under investigation by the police for allegedly encouraging and abetting the walkouts.