South Korea says to start legal action against doctors over walkout
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00:00 So I'll speak to correspondent Chloe Bornion who joins us from there.
00:03 Chloe, the government's talking pretty tough on this now, isn't it?
00:06 Yeah, you're right. So they just announced today that they started taking the first steps
00:13 to suspend the medical licenses of the doctor, the trainee doctors that are actually in the workout.
00:18 This was announced last week. They gave a deadline last Thursday that had little to
00:24 no effect for the trainees coming back to work. They are also stepping up against the Korea
00:30 Medical Association. So they are currently investigating the current and former leader
00:36 of the Korea Medical Association because they are suspecting them that they are at the origin of the
00:44 workout for the trainee doctors. The headquarter of the association have even been raided by the
00:50 police last week, just a few days before the massive rally that took place yesterday in Seoul,
00:56 where about thousands of doctors have attended to show their opposition against the measure that
01:02 decided by the government to raise the doctor, the students quota by 2,000 extra students starting
01:11 next year. I suppose the crucial point, Chloe, is how on earth all of this is affecting patients
01:17 there? Yeah, well, as you say, it's about 70 percent of interns that are actually out of job
01:26 in nearly two weeks. And they are really affecting the five biggest hospitals because that's where
01:31 the intern, the trainee doctors are making up to 40 percent of medical staff. And the hospital
01:37 have been explaining that they already have to cancel about 50 percent of their surgeries.
01:42 They also are sending people with non-life threatening conditions back home. And there
01:47 have been some reports of situation of people of dire medical situation that have been sent
01:52 away from several hospitals that couldn't take care of them. So even in emergency situation,
01:58 the hospital are starting to feel very strained. And hospitals are explaining that with the strike
02:06 going on and the workout keep going on, this is going to be more and more difficult for the
02:11 remaining staff to take good care of people. And the strike might still go on because on one side,
02:17 we have doctors that are really strongly opposing this rising of the medical quota for next year.
02:24 And on the other side, the government have said that it was for them an emergency measure that
02:29 has to be taken in order to be able to get better proportion of doctors because they are lacking
02:35 practitioners outside of Seoul and in some very specific fields like pediatrics or neurosurgery.
02:43 And it's also going to be an impending problem in a country like South Korea, where the population
02:50 is aging very fast. Clary, thanks very much. Clary Borgnion, correspondent talking to us there from
02:56 Seoul.