[News Today] HOSPITAL RESIDENTS SILENT TO GOVT ULTIMATUM

[LEAD]
The government's deadline for trainee doctors, who have walked out in protest of the government's plan to increase medical school admission quota, has passed as of yesterday. Yet, most of the trainees involved have not responded. Major training hospitals will now process mass resignations for those who remained silent.

[Report]
This e-mail was sent out to trainee doctors missing from their jobs by a training hospital in the Seoul metropolitan area.

It asks junior doctors to let the hospital know by Monday noon if they will resign or return to work.

The date to begin processing
resignations was set at June 4 by the
government. The e-mail reads, failure to reply could result in resignations being processed.

Sources say of the some 12,000 trainee doctors who have yet to return, only a fraction have replied to their hospitals.

One junior doctor says he decided not to follow the government's guidelines and to not apply for the training program in the second half of the year.

Another junior doctor says she refuses to return, but to her knowledge some of the trainee doctors in their fourth year at popular departments have returned to work.

The medical community says accepting junior doctors' resignations en masse will only make the situation worse.

Kang Hee-kyung / Head, SNU Med School·SNUH emergency committee
If the goal is to rectify the healthcare void, they must rethink policies in
a transparent and rational manner rather than......imposing a deadline and adding pressure.

Training hospitals have decided to follow the government's guidelines by setting their quota of trainee doctors for the second half of the year after confirming by Wednesday how many vacancies they have.

The government says it's waiting for the results of resignation processing to be submitted by the hospitals.

After collecting data from the hospitals, the government will consider cutting trainee doctor quotas at hospitals that fail to process resignations of their trainee doctors who refuse to return.