The Korean Society for Preventive Medicine (대한예방의학회) said that training more doctors will not be enough to solve the shortage of doctors in the regions. The society said a comprehensive package is needed that also includes measures to respond to regional depopulation and to ease the concentration of patients in the Seoul metropolitan area. The remarks come ahead of the launch of the regional doctor system (지역의사제) next year.
Yoon Seok-jun, chairman of the society and a faculty member at Korea University College of Medicine, put it more directly. The regional healthcare crisis, he said, is the result of regional depopulation.
It is commonly thought that people leave because hospitals disappear. Yoon sees the causation the other way around. In a town that has lost its population, a clinic also struggles to hold out for long. Even if a new doctor is sent there, it is hard for that doctor to stay long if the neighborhood he or she lives in is emptying out.
The solutions now being pursued lean toward training more doctors. The regional doctor system takes effect next year, and the establishment of a national graduate school of medicine (국립의학전문대학원) is also being pushed. Both are policies that focus on training new doctors to work in the regions. Details such as the number of students to be selected and the length of mandatory service will only become clear once the detailed implementation plans are released.
The society named living conditions and patient concentration as the tasks.
Living conditions refer to the conditions that allow doctors and their families to put down roots and live in a region. Doctors will stay only if life outside the clinic is bearable. The situation on the patients' side is similar.
Residents who find it hard to get treatment in their own neighborhoods head to large hospitals in the Seoul metropolitan area, and local hospitals lose that many patients. Yoon's mention of measures concerning large hospitals in the metropolitan area, along with securing medical personnel for the regions, is connected to this trend.
When patients leave, hospitals decline, and when hospitals decline, doctors also lose their reason to stay. That is why the Korean Society for Preventive Medicine put forward training, settlement and easing patient concentration as a single package.
To send doctors to residents who are losing places to get treatment, the towns where those doctors will live as neighbors must also be made ready. As the launch of the regional doctor system approaches, the discussion is also shifting from how many more doctors to select to where those doctors will live.
