Majority of new trainee doctors refuse registration for appointment

Medical staff walks at a university hospital in Seoul, South Korea. By Soobin Han

The registration for appointment of prospective trainee doctors who were scheduled to get training as interns at hospitals from this year has ended, but the actual registration rate was only 4.3 percent. The supply and demand of doctors is expected to be disrupted.

The Ministry of Health and Welfare said on April 3, “Of the 3,068 people who were supposed to complete the appointment registration with the Training Environment Evaluation Committee by the 2nd as new trainee doctors at each training hospital this year, only 131 have registered." This means that 2,937 new trainees will not be able to get training in the first half of this year. In February, when trainee doctors undergoing training resigned and left hospitals, the new trainees also submitted their resignation letters to their hospitals. The government urged the new trainees to register for appointment, but they remained stubborn.

A trainee doctor refers to an intern or resident who is training to acquire a specialist qualification after obtaining a medical license. Interns go through training for each medical subject for a year and explore the medical subjects they will major in. They then choose a speciality and become a specialist after three to four years of residency.

They are trainees, but they also practice medicine. New interns spend more time training than practicing, but after training in the first half of the first year, they are in charge of certain medical tasks at the hospital. Large hospitals with a high proportion of trainee doctors are expected to suffer from a shortage of doctors this year.

The medical community fears that this will lead to a long-term shortage of specialists.

A staffer from one of Seoul's Big 5 hospitals, consisting of Seoul National University Hospital, Severance Hospital, Samsung Seoul Hospital, Asan Hospital, and the Seoul St. Mary's Hospital, said, "The problem is that the system, which smoothly supplied doctors, has been stopped. The shortage will continue until the next batch of interns starts training, and the longer this period lasts, the more the problem will accumulate.” Another staffer at a training hospital said, "If there is no intern this year, there will be no resident applicants next year, so there will be a gap in manpower for more than five years at training hospitals."

The government is also considering measures. "There are concerns about the future (disruption in the supply of specialists)," Park Min-soo, Deputy Minister of Health and Welfare, said at a briefing. "The government will further examine whether there are other ways to deal with this situation. It is difficult to say clearly about measures at this point."

The incident has again confirmed the problem of large hospitals relying excessively on trainee doctors who are educatees. "While training hospitals are now in emergency management, they have made a lot of money in the past by relying on trainee doctors. Hospitals should come up with self-rescue measures in a way that does not pass on the damage to their members,” said Jeon Jin-han, director of the policy bureau of the Korean Federation Medical Activist Groups for Health Rights. "It doesn't make sense to not hire more specialists when the government is inappropriately using health insurance funds to support medical treatments for emergency and critical illnesses.”

※This article has undergone review by a professional translator after being translated by an AI translation tool.