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Mar. 28  2024
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More Doctors to Join Strike Today, Raising Fears About Medical Crisis

More than 10,000 ``fellows'' will today join the ongoing strike by 12,000 interns and residents and 5,000 clinic doctors, who are protesting the medical reform package, deepening concerns about a possible one more crisis in health care services.

Source  :  Korea Times

More than 10,000 ``fellows'' will today join the ongoing strike by 12,000 interns and residents and 5,000 clinic doctors, who are protesting the medical reform package, deepening concerns about a possible one more crisis in health care services.

Fellow refers to doctors who work at general and university hospitals to become professors after completing their courses as interns and residents.

Patients are expected to suffer serious inconveniences and confusion, as most general hospitals will only be allowed to maintain emergency rooms and intensive care units, following the expanded strike.

A group of 13,000 fellows at general hospitals said over the weekend that they will tender their resignations en masse by 8 o'clock this morning, and immediately go on strike.

``We have no other choice but to take collective action against the government-initiated medical reform program, which deals a severe blow to our medical profession,'' said Lee Chun-ku, head of the association of the protesting doctoral fellows.

On Friday, the group decided to call a strike by doctoral fellows beginning today, claiming that the reform plan is threatening their survival.

Doctoral fellows are doctors working for general hospitals, mainly affiliated with colleges and universities, after finishing courses for internship and residency.

The reform package was introduced on Aug. 1 to draw a clear line between the doctor's job of giving prescriptions and the pharmacist's job of drug dispensing. However, it faces a great challenge from the doctors' collective action.

About 30 percent of the 20,000 clinic-operating doctors have been staging a walkout against the separation of drug prescription and dispensing since the start of the reform, calling for a greater role and more rights for medical practitioners, as well as for higher incomes.

More than 70 percent of the 15,000 interns and residents were also holding a separate work stoppage for similar reasons.

On Saturday, some 5,000 interns and residents gathered at Kyung Hee University for a mass rally against the reform scheme, calling for an increase in doctor fees, better working conditions and an overhaul of the dilapidated health care system.

The strikers are strongly opposed to the new medical system, under which doctors are banned from dispensing drugs to outpatients, one of the major sources of their income.

If doctoral fellows join the ongoing strike as scheduled, only medical professors will be available for the treatment of patients. Thus, most general hospitals will be forced to stop taking care of patients.

``We are now suffering an acute lack of medical personnel due to the walkout by interns and residents. The planned strike by fellows will virtually paralyze the operation of general hospitals,'' said an official of Severance Hospital, affiliated with Yonsei University.

Patients are increasingly nervous about the escalating strike, complaining that doctors were again holding them as hostages in order to promote their own demands.

Many patients, as well as their families and other citizens, have been getting angrier with the doctors' collective action, ever since a six-day strike by doctors caused an unprecedented health care crisis in late June.

The walkout forced the government to delay the implementation of the medical reform package by one month.

In light of this situation, the Ministry of Health and Welfare has threatened to take stern legal action against the striking doctors, interns and residents, urging them to go back to work.

The prosecution also vowed to crack down on those who are found to orchestrate what it called an illegal strike.

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