Medical students pressured to leave

[Anchor]

The reason the Medical Association is maintaining such a strong stance is due to medical students and residents who are continuing to take leaves of absence and resignations without backing down an inch.

There have been reports that medical students are pressuring their peers to take leaves of absence, and even urging incoming freshmen to do the same.

Next, we have reporter Hong Seong-hee.

[Report]

Recently, a report was received by the Ministry of Education.

It reports that a fellow medical student repeatedly posted the status of leave of absence submissions in a group chat, psychologically pressuring others to take a leave.

There are even claims that they directly contacted incoming freshmen to coerce them into taking a leave of absence.

Based on these reports, the Ministry of Education has referred a total of 11 cases to the police for investigation over the past year following the conflict between the medical community and the government.

With the semester starting soon, there are currently about 18,000 medical students on leave across 39 medical schools nationwide, which is about 95% of the total.

[Lee Seon-woo/Chairman of the Emergency Response Committee, the Student Association of Korean Medical Colleges: "Despite the fact that the quota for medical schools has increased by up to 400% in one academic year, the reality is that we can't even choose land to build buildings. However, the government is only avoiding the outcome of its self-inflicted medical reform, leaving us no choice but to submit leave of absence requests."]

Currently, only 8.7% of residents are working in training hospitals with emergency rooms.

More than half of the resigning residents have already re-employed in clinics primarily treating mild patients as general practitioners.

Despite incentives such as special training incentives and postponement of military enlistment, the application rate for resident recruitment in the first half of this year was only 2.2%.

They argue that not only should the increase in medical school quotas be scrapped, but also that the government's medical reform policies themselves should be abolished, which is difficult for the government to accept.

Over the past year, the national budget allocated to fill the medical gap has reached 3.3 trillion won.

This is KBS News, Hong Seong-hee.