Essential Medical Support Measures... Emergency Surgery 'Emergency Addition' Increased from 50% to 100%

Ambulance stock photo.

The emergency surcharge applied when critically ill emergency patients undergo surgery within 24 hours of visiting the emergency room will be increased from 50% to 100% starting in June.

On the 27th, the Ministry of Health and Welfare held the 7th Health Insurance Policy Deliberation Committee meeting and announced the approval of an improvement plan for the emergency surcharge reflecting this change. This follows the essential medical support measures announced in January, which included specific fee improvement plans. In cases of severe emergencies, long waiting times for medical staff are required for urgent surgeries, and due to poor working conditions, this field is often avoided by healthcare professionals. As a result, there have been limitations in responding to urgent situations, leading to emergency patients sometimes being unable to receive timely surgery and experiencing repeated visits to the emergency room, known as ‘emergency room spinning.’

A government official explained, “Considering on-site opinions that emphasize the need to focus compensation on critical emergency surgery fields to prevent the departure of medical personnel in essential medical areas and to efficiently utilize limited resources, the fee surcharge system has been reorganized.” Additionally, the surcharge system will be applied cumulatively up to a maximum of 200% during nighttime hours from 6 p.m. to 9 a.m. the following day on holidays.

The expansion of the emergency surcharge will be prioritized for Regional and Specialized Emergency Medical Centers (42 locations) and Regional Trauma Centers (14 locations). The Ministry of Health and Welfare plans to gradually expand the target institutions after collecting opinions on the responsibility for treatment functions, standards, and names of emergency medical institutions by type.

The fees for major surgeries in cardiovascular thoracic surgery will also be significantly improved. Despite the high difficulty of surgeries for heart diseases, there have been criticisms that a single fee system has been applied due to the low number of surgeries, resulting in insufficient compensation. A representative example is aortic dissection. This disease involves a tear in the tunica media of the aorta, causing the vessel wall to split along the long axis of the aorta. If untreated, one in four patients dies within 24 hours. It requires teamwork among medical staff and the risk level increases sharply depending on the time of occurrence. Furthermore, complex pediatric heart diseases are currently estimated to have only about 20 surgeons capable of performing surgery in Korea.

The government plans to subdivide the list of certain surgeries for aortic dissection and pediatric heart surgery, and to establish a new fee for cerebral perfusion during cardiopulmonary bypass performed alongside heart surgery, thereby strengthening compensation.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.