[Reporter’s Notebook] Increasing Medical School Quotas, Establishing the Principle of Proper Placement First

Next week, the government is expected to announce plans to expand medical school admission quotas starting from the 2025 university entrance exam. The quota, which has been capped at 3,058 students annually for 18 years since 2006, is likely to be increased by more than 500. The government has long proposed increasing medical school quotas as a solution to fill essential and regional medical service gaps.

Currently, even the Big 5 hospitals in South Korea are struggling to recruit medical personnel in less favored departments such as thoracic surgery. The situation is even more severe in provincial areas. Despite multiple job postings from general hospitals outside metropolitan cities offering annual salaries of 300 to 400 million KRW to doctors, many positions remain unfilled. The so-called "emergency room roundabout" phenomenon, where emergency patients drift in ambulances and die due to a lack of backup staff in emergency rooms, is becoming a looming reality.

The medical community argues, "The medical service gap is due to policy failure, not a shortage of doctors." They have stated that if the government pushes for an increase in medical school quotas, they will not hesitate to engage in strong protests. In 2020, when the Moon Jae-in administration announced plans to increase medical school quotas by 4,000 over ten years, the medical community staged large-scale strikes.

However, these claims and actions by the medical community find little public sympathy. According to a "National Medical Issue Survey" conducted by Kim Won-i, a member of the National Assembly’s Health and Welfare Committee from the Democratic Party, the majority of the public believes that medical school quotas should be increased by 300 to 1,000 students. Among them, the largest group, 24.0%, responded that the quota should be increased by more than 1,000 students.

South Korea is aging faster than any other country in the world. Medical demand is also surging. The logic that increasing medical school quotas is necessary to fill the shortage of doctors is natural. Internal data from the Ministry of Health and Welfare indicates that even if the quota is dramatically increased by 1,000 students starting next year, the number of doctors per 1,000 people will still be insufficient compared to major countries like the United States and Japan.

However, if doctors do not go where they are needed even after the quota is increased, the problem will only worsen. Specialists in less favored fields who have treated patients for over a decade at university hospitals are moving to private clinics offering cosmetic procedures such as fillers, Botox, and skin lasers. The government must present a detailed plan to guide these doctors toward departments experiencing medical service gaps and avoidance, such as obstetrics and gynecology, pediatrics, and surgical fields, and to realize the practical effects of expanding medical school quotas.

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