February 20, 2025
SEOUL – South Korea’s medical care crisis shows no sign of abating. The majority of junior doctors are yet to return to their workplaces. Emergency room care continues to struggle with staff shortages. Doctors are overworked, and patients are also forced to live with delays or cancellations of surgeries.
It is time to end the protracted medical crisis sparked by President Yoon Suk Yeol’s policy initiative to expand the medical school enrollment quota despite fierce opposition from doctors.
On Feb. 19 last year, interns and residents left hospitals en masse in protest against the Yoon administration’s plan to increase the number of medical school admissions by 2,000.
At the time, the government claimed that the expansion was needed to better prepare for a severe shortage of medical professionals in a rapidly aging society. But doctors and medical students opposed the plan, arguing that a bigger quota would undermine the quality of education in consideration of the capacity of medical school facilities and the limited number of professors.
The bruising confrontation between the government and the medical sector ended up hurting patients, especially those who needed critical surgeries or emergency treatment.
A year has passed, but there is little sign of trainee doctors returning to hospitals. The number of medical students taking leaves of absence has not gone down either.
Adding to the problems was the political turmoil over the impeachment of Yoon following his short-lived martial law decree in December. As the government was plunged into emergency mode, the medical crisis was put on the back burner and the disruption resulted in far-reaching consequences.
With many trainees having suspended their residency programs, only 534 candidates — just 19 percent of last year’s figure — took the first-stage medical certification exam on Friday. As of last Thursday, the attendance rate of resident doctors at 211 training hospitals stood at a mere 8.7 percent.
The bleak figures come at a critical juncture. The deadline for determining the 2026 medical school quota is fast approaching. A nationwide allocation must be settled by the end of February to allow universities to submit their proposals to the Ministry of Education in March, set admission guidelines in April and announce the final details in May.
Within 10 days, the government and doctors have to discuss and settle the enrollment quota issue for 2026. This is an urgent task, especially considering the much-dreaded possibility that medical students could extend their mass leave of absence for a second consecutive year — a scenario that would put the country’s medical training system into irreversible disarray and exacerbate the already painful medical care crisis.
Despite the political upheaval over Yoon, the government seems to have noticed the gravity of the situation. Last month, acting President Choi Sang-mok issued a rare apology to trainee doctors and medical students, and urged them to return to dialogue last month.
On Feb. 10, the government announced that it would reconsider the 2026 medical school quota from scratch, while pledging benefits for trainee doctors who return. Its basic position is that the enrollment quota could stay at 3,058 — the existing level before an increase made for this year — or go up to 5,058 next year, an increase of 2,000.
Medical organizations, doctors and students, for their part, should move beyond their insistence on scrapping the expansion entirely and instead talk with the government to explore whether there is a reasonable and practical adjustment to admissions based on workforce projections.
Delaying action would only deepen the medical service vacuum and push the conflict between the government and the medical profession to an irreparable state.