South Korea: Doctors on strike risk arrest if they don’t show up for work

The South Korean government is considering legal action against junior doctors who are on strike and may revoke their medical licenses if they do not return to work by Thursday.

Three quarters of the country’s new doctors have stopped working in the past week. This has caused problems and delays for surgeries at big hospitals.

The new doctors in training are upset about the government’s idea to allow many more students to go to medical school each year. This is supposed to make more doctors available in the healthcare system.

South Korea doesn’t have enough doctors for its people, especially with more old people, and the government says there will be even fewer doctors in the future.

This week at St Mary’s Hospital in Seoul, the empty hallways showed us a peek at what the future could be like. Hardly any doctors or patients were in the area outside the emergency room. Patients were told to stay away.

Ryu Ok Hada, who is 25 years old and is a doctor, and his co-workers haven’t gone to the hospital for more than a week.

“It’s strange not waking up at 4 a. m,” Ryu said jokingly. The young doctor told the BBC that he usually works for more than 100 hours a week, and sometimes goes without sleep for 40 hours. “We work a lot but get paid very little, which is crazy. ”

Even though doctors in South Korea get paid a lot, Ryu thinks that he and other new doctors can end up making less than the least amount of money per hour because they work long hours. He thinks that adding more doctors won’t solve the problems in the healthcare system that make them work too much and earn too little.

Healthcare in South Korea is mostly run by private companies, but it’s not too expensive. Doctors say that life-saving surgeries and specialist care are not being paid enough, while less important treatments like cosmetic surgeries are paid too much. This means more doctors are choosing to work in big cities where they can make more money. As a result, rural areas don’t have enough doctors and emergency rooms in big cities are very busy.

Ryu, who has worked for a year, says that trainee and junior doctors are being taken advantage of by the university hospitals because they are being paid very little for their work. In big hospitals, they make up more than 40% of the staff and play a critical role in keeping the hospital running.

As a result, the number of surgeries that some hospitals can do has been cut in half over the past week. The problems have mostly only affected scheduled medical procedures, which have been delayed. There have been only a few times when people needing urgent care weren’t able to receive it. An old woman who was having a heart attack died in an ambulance last Friday because seven hospitals would not help her.

The government has announced that the patient had incurable cancer and her death was not caused by the walkout.

There are no medical doctors available.

The public and healthcare workers are getting frustrated with the doctors because they have to do more work. Nurses say they have to do tasks in operating rooms that doctors usually do.

Ms Choi, a nurse at a hospital in Incheon, said she now has to work an extra hour and a half each day and is doing the work of two people.

She said that the patients are worried, and she is upset that this is going on without a solution. She asked the doctors to return to work and find a different way to show their complaints.

The government wants to accept more medical students into university next year. They want to increase the number from 3,000 to 5,000. The doctors who are on strike say that if more doctors are trained, the quality of care will decrease because it would mean giving medical licenses to less skilled doctors.

However, the doctors are finding it hard to make people believe that having more doctors would be a bad thing. They have not received much sympathy. On Tuesday, Mrs. Lee, who is 74 years old, went to Seoul’s Severance Hospital for treatment for colon cancer. She had to travel for over an hour to get there.

“Where we live outside the city, there are no doctors,” she said.

Lee’s husband Soon-dong said that this problem has been ignored for too long and it needs to be solved now. The doctors are thinking only of themselves.

The pair was upset that more doctors might go on strike. They said they were willing to pay more for their treatment if it would help end the argument.

However, President Yoon Suk Yeol’s popularity has gone up since the walkout started. This means the government doesn’t have much reason to change the system and make procedures more costly before the elections in April.

Both sides are now in a serious and tense situation where they are not willing to back down. The health ministry won’t let the doctors quit and is saying they could get in trouble for breaking the law if they don’t go back to work by the end of the day.

The deputy minister of health, Park Min-soo, said that people who don’t meet the deadline will have their licenses taken away for at least three months.

The government will begin on Monday.

It is expected that the possibility of being punished will make doctors go back to work. Nearly 300 out of 9,000 striking doctors have already gone back to work.

Some people who left think the government’s tough actions could change what the public thinks. This Sunday, the Korean Medical Association will decide whether experienced doctors should work with new doctors in training. If many of their younger coworkers have been arrested, they will be more likely to do something about it.

Ryu said he was ready to be arrested and lose his medical license. He said if the government wouldn’t listen to their problems, he would quit his job.

“He said that the medical system is not working well, and if it keeps going like this, it will fail and not survive. ” “I have experience farming, so maybe I could do that again. “