Trainee doctor exodus pushes South Korea’s collapsing healthcare system to the brink

Disillusioned trainee doctors have abandoned hospitals in their thousands, leaving critical services in shambles and patients turned away

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Trainee doctors have walked off the job in their droves in South Korea – forcing hospitals to scale back critical services. Photo: EPA-EFE

Park Chan-kyong

Published: 8:00am, 27 Aug 2024Updated: 9:28am, 27 Aug 2024

Corrected [9:26am, 27 Aug, 2024]

[9:26am, 27 Aug, 2024]
An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified South Korean politician Ahn Cheol-soo as Ahn Chul-woo. This has been corrected.

South Korea’s healthcare system is unravelling at an alarming rate, the result of a months-long strike by thousands of trainee doctors who have walked off the job in protest, abandoning accident and emergency departments – and forcing hospitals to scale back critical services.

The consequences have been catastrophic. Across the nation, patients are being turned away from overstretched, understaffed A&Es, with some large hospitals suspending treatment for cardiac arrests and traumatic injuries. It’s a crisis compounded by a resurgence in Covid-19 cases, pushing the system to the brink.

“My current situation here shows how the emergency care system is collapsing,” said Namgung In, an emergency medicine doctor in Seoul. He described having to turn away a traffic-accident victim with serious injuries who had already been refused treatment by multiple hospitals.

The strike began in February, sparked by the government’s decision to significantly increase annual medical school admission quotas – a move the country’s 13,000 trainee doctors saw as a threat to their wages and job prospects. In a dramatic act of defiance, most resigned en masse, abandoning hospitals that had grown dependent on their labour to prop up an ailing system hobbled by low reimbursements.

“I am sorry, sir. We will never come back,” one disillusioned trainee doctor wrote on Sunday to Hwang Gyu-suk, the head of the Seoul Medical Association, in a letter seen by This Week in Asia.

Since quitting, the doctor said he had taken on odd jobs as a chauffeur and orchard worker to make ends meet.