@samuelszuchan: In February 2024, almost all of South Korea's junior hospital doctors quit at the same time. The country's biggest hospitals had to operate for over a year without them. These doctors were "trainees": graduates of medical school who work in hospitals for another four or five years before qualifying as specialists. Their departure created a shortage: trainees accounted for 46% of the doctors at Seoul National University Hospital. The walkout was triggered by a government plan to increase the number of medical students by 2,000 a year, on top of the 3,058 already admitted. The trainees believed that the government was trying to solve the wrong problem. South Korea doesn't suffer from a shortage of doctors who want to specialize in dermatology or eye surgery. It does suffer from a shortage of doctors willing to work in emergency rooms and pediatric wards. The trainees argued that simply graduating more doctors would not solve this problem, as more graduates would just go where the money is. The trainees wanted the government to solve a different problem: their terms of employment. They worked more than 80 hours a week, some received wages close to the minimum wage, and they could be sued or even prosecuted if a treatment went wrong. Instead of striking, the doctors opted to resign. A strike can be countered by an order from the government telling strikers to return to work. Since a revision to the law in 2023, ignoring that order can lead to imprisonment and the revocation of one's medical license. But resignation is not a strike, and, since the doctors resigned individually, it was much harder to punish them. Most Koreans thought it was really about money. In one poll, 64% of Koreans thought that the doctors were protecting their own interests. They certainly have a lot to protect: in Korea, specialists who then set up private clinics, which many trainees do, make nearly seven times the average income, more than in any other OECD country for which the data is available. As the dispute continued, emergency rooms began to reject patients. One night, in Busan, a woman in her thirties was found unconscious, and 92 hospitals turned her away. Four hours later, she was finally accepted, and she died. After more than a year, the government relented. In April 2025, it agreed to cut medical-school admissions back to 3,058, and, in September, the trainees returned to work. Last November, a government audit disclosed how the administration had arrived at the number of 2,000 additional students a year: it estimated a deficit of 10,000 doctors and divided it by five years. Ultimately, the government based its target on elementary arithmetic, the trainees wanted their workplace grievances fixed first, and for over a year neither side would yield. Patients, such as the woman in Busan, paid the price.

Sam Szuchan

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Thursday 22 October 2026 17:00:00 GMT