Doctors limit service hours to protest admissions hike

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Doctors limit service hours to protest admissions hike

Published: 01 Apr. 2024, 17:29 Updated: 01 Apr. 2024, 18:52

LEE SOO-JUNG
lee.soojung1@joongang.co.kr

A notice attached on the door of a private clinic in Seongnam, Gyeonggi informs patients of reduced service hours on Monday. [NEWS1]

Doctors across Korea limit their service hours starting Monday in protest of the government’s plan to expand the medical school admissions quota, hindering access to health care.

Medical professors at major hospitals are shortening their working hours, cutting back outpatient treatments and scheduled surgeries.

Some doctors at private clinics are reducing hours, too.

The Korean Medical Association (KMA) — the nation’s largest doctors’ group — said Sunday that doctors in private practice are also implementing a 40-hour workweek voluntarily from April 1. After-hours treatment at private clinic hospitals is expected to become less available.

Medical professors are hired by general or large hospitals. Doctors in private practice are self-employed by having full authority over self-owned private clinics, mostly providing primary care.

In general hospitals providing secondary and tertiary care, medical professors will minimize outpatient appointments and focus on critically ill and emergency patients. They will delay or reschedule appointments for non-critically ill patients.

The Medical Professors Association of Korea, the representative body of medical professors, earlier capped their weekly working hours to 52 beginning March 25.

The new measure — effective from Monday — went a step further by prioritizing critically ill patients above all.

Rescheduling and delay in medical appointments for non-critically ill patients have become inevitable.

"Although the association cannot force all doctors in private practice [to follow the collective action], as it had been discussed earlier, those who prepared could implement such measures immediately," Kim Sung-geun, head of public relations for the KMA’s emergency committee, said on Sunday.

“Most members agreed that servicing only 40 hours a week is the most realistic way [for protest] and the association believes it will spread naturally.”

The new workweek hour rule is likely to further downsize the operation of general hospitals, which already partially shut down wards due to staffing shortages caused by the junior doctors’ walkout.

Seoul National University Bundang Hospital in Seongnam, Gyeonggi, has seen a 30 to 50 percent drop in hospital bed occupancy and surgical operations after its junior doctors staged the walkout.

The hospital partially postponed non-urgent surgeries and has solely been delivering medical services centering on emergency, critically ill and cancer patients.

Bae Jang-whan, head professor of the emergency committee of the Chungbuk National University Hospital speaks in a press conference held in front of the university's medical school in North Chungcheong on Monday. [KIM SUNG-TAE]

Chungbuk National University Hospital, the only tertiary care hospital in North Chungcheong, discontinued operations of five out of its 20 wards. On average, the number of the hospitals' daily operations were cut in half.

Medical professors from the hospital said Monday that they "will not [strictly] implement a 52-hour workweek considering [the hospital's] financial situation" but will "adjust working hours to secure a minimum level of breaks for doctors."

"When adding the 24-hour long overnight duty, which comes twice a week, to working hours for treatments and appointments, weekly working hours easily surpass 70," Bae Jang-whan, head of the emergency committee of the hospital, said Monday in a press conference held in front of the university's medical school.

"Most medical departments in the hospital will stop seeing outpatients starting Friday."

BY LEE SOO-JUNG [lee.soojung1@joongang.co.kr]