South Korea takes step to punish five doctors for walkout
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A vacant ward of a hospital in Busan as nearly 10,000 trainee doctors walk off the job nationwide in protest.
PHOTO: EPA-EFE
SEOUL – South Korea filed a criminal complaint against five doctors it suspects of encouraging a mass walkout of trainee doctors, taking the first legal step that could lead to the stripping of medical licences for those in the labour action.
The Health and Welfare Ministry said it filed the complaint with the police on Feb 27 against five members of the Korean Medical Association (KMA) lobby group for allegedly violating medical law and an order to return to work.
This stepped up pressure ahead of a Feb 29 deadline to return to work for thousands of trainee doctors who have walked off the job
KMA spokesman Joo Soo-ho called the move “an exercise of unfair government power”.
He said by telephone that members would be willing to explain their positions to the police, if the authorities summon them.
President Yoon Suk-yeol has told doctors to end their walkout
His government has been preparing to arrest, prosecute and possibly suspend the licences of doctors who do not heed the ultimatum to return to work for organising a labour action it contends runs counter to the law.
About 9,000 of the country’s around 13,000 trainee doctors walked off the job in the labour action that started last week.
They are protesting against a government plan to increase the number of seats at medical schools by 2,000 from the current 3,058 to alleviate a doctor shortage that ranks as one of the most acute in the developed world.
The walkout has led to about a 50 per cent reduction in surgeries and caused emergency rooms to turn away people due to staffing shortages, the government said.
Mr Yoon’s administration contends that the plan is needed to have more doctors as the country faces a demographic crisis with one of the world’s fastest-ageing populations.
The doctors argue that the plan does not address fundamental problems such as poor working conditions, a concentration of physicians in urban areas and not enough protection from malpractice suits.
Polling indicates wide support among the public for the government plan.
Critics of the walkout contend that the labour action may be more about protecting the earning power of doctors, which ranks top among Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries, rather than improving the quality of the South Korean healthcare system.
Mr Yoon has seen his support rate rise to a three-month high in a weekly tracking poll from Gallup Korea as he has not bowed to pressure to scrap or reduce his plan to increase medical school seats.
This could help his conservative People Power Party in the April elections, where it is trying to take control of Parliament from the progressive Democratic Party. Bloomberg
