Junior doctors won't return to training hospitals, warn SNUH professors

Medical professors at Seoul National University Hospital (SNUH) said they expect most junior doctors will not return to hospitals by Monday, the deadline for training hospitals to finish processing their resignations.

Prof. Kang Hee-gyung, head of Seoul National University Hospital's emergency response committee, speaks at a press conference in central Seoul on Monday. [YONHAP]

Medical professors at Seoul National University Hospital (SNUH) said they expect most junior doctors will not return to hospitals by Monday, the deadline for training hospitals to finish processing their resignations.

In a press conference, an emergency response committee representing the professors urged the government to establish “upright health policies through a transparent and reasonable decision-making process.”

The professors said that 95 percent of SNUH junior doctors who submitted their resignations intend to quit their training hospitals. They also said the government’s concessions of not penalizing and granting them special treatment are not compelling enough to make them return.

“Junior doctors walked off from hospitals as an expression to protest against the government’s unilateral and unreasonable drive for its health policies,” Prof. Kang Hee-gyung, head of the committee, said.

Kang’s remarks seem to suggest that junior doctors will remain unmoved unless the government addresses the fundamental reason that prompted them to stage a walkout.

The committee also asked the government to stop “pressuring junior doctors by setting up a deadline” for processing resignations.

Last week, the government mandated training hospitals nationwide to complete processing junior doctors’ resignations by Monday. It also warned that non-compliance would cause hospitals to receive fewer job slots for the fall semester recruitment.

In response, the hospitals sent messages to junior doctors to confirm their employment status and notified them that they could be suspended from their posts if they did not answer.

SNUH professors also said that "unilaterally dismissing junior doctors" constitutes “tyrannical” behavior that ignores junior doctors’ individual stances. The committee said nothing much could be done to mitigate the fallout from the resignations other than “maintaining the current level of medical services.” They said the current situation amounts to the “collapse of medical services,” adding that they, too, are “skeptical about continuing their duties next year.”

A patient walks beside a poster on the wall, which reads that four months have passed since junior doctors walked out, in a general hospital in Seoul on Monday. [NEWS1]

On the same day, a nationwide professorial coalition of medical schools’ emergency response committees and the Medical Professors Association of Korea issued a written notice to the Ministry of Health and Welfare, asking the government to immediately stop “pressuring training hospitals and citing disadvantages they could face.”

They also reminded hospital heads that they bear a heavy responsibility to protect their junior doctors and that dismissing them unilaterally is an “excessive measure which not even the ministry officially asked for.”

The nation’s largest doctors’ group, the Korean Medical Association (KMA), also denounced the government’s measure, saying it will put the Korean medical system into a “permanently unrecoverable abyss.”

In a separate press conference held by the KMA on Monday, Lim Hyun-taek, president of the association, warned that the regional medical system could be “destroyed” by the government’s decision to allow junior doctors who resigned to apply for their training in any region — without restrictions.

The scheme would allow junior doctors who previously worked in regional hospitals to relocate to larger hospitals in the greater Seoul area, causing an outflow of staff in countryside hospitals.

According to the Health Ministry, 1,094 of 13,756 junior doctors, or eight percent, were at work at 211 training hospitals nationwide on Thursday.

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