Nearly half of residents who resigned now reemployed at lower-tier clinics

A doctor is seen walking in front of the emergency room of a Seoul-based hospital on Friday. (Yonhap)

Some 44.9 percent of the medical residents who resigned en masse to protest the government's medical school admissions hike have been rehired at other medical institutions, a Ministry of Health and Welfare data showed Thursday.

Of the 9,163 residents who have walked of the job in the nationwide medical strike, 4,111 have been reemployed as doctors as of Sunday, according to the ministry data submitted to Rep. Kim Yoon of the main opposition Democratic Party of Korea.

The data showed that most of the reemployed residents were unable to return to their earlier positions. Only 1,050 of them -- 25.5 percent -- were able to get a job at hospital-level institutions, and 648 of them got hired at general hospitals.

Just 72 trainee doctors got hired at tertiary hospitals, accounting for 1.8 percent of those who got new jobs. Tertiary hospitals are defined by the Medical Service Act as general hospitals providing highly specialized medical services, and are institutes where most of the training for doctors take place.

Over half of the residents who resigned and got rehired -- 2,341 -- were working at clinics, lower-tier medical institutions that provide medical services primarily on an outpatient basis.

Of the former residents working at clinics, 808 were general practitioners, followed by 457 in internal medicine, 199 in orthopedics, 193 in otolaryngology, 168 in dermatology and 164 in ophthalmology.

Data shows that of the 221 hospitals across the country that provide training courses for doctors, only 8.7 percent -- the combined total of 1,071 residents and 103 interns -- are still at their jobs.

The resignations have led to more applications for unemployment benefits from the training hospitals. An earlier report from the Ministry of Employment and Labor showed that 328 former doctors of these training hospitals applied for unemployment from Feb. 19 -- which was when the mass resignations commenced -- until August, which is over three times the number logged during the same period last year.

The majority of the doctors in the country have been participating in the ongoing walkout, sparked by the government's plan to hike the medical school admissions quota by 2,000 places starting in 2025.

The strike has resulted in a nationwide shortage of the medical staff, with reports in particular of emergency patients being turned away by emergency rooms due to the lack of necessary specialized medical workers.