Shortage of public healthcare personnel, is it a problem of number of doctors?

Article information

J Korean Med Assoc. 2012;55(9):812-814

Publication date (electronic) : 2012 September 20

doi : https://doi.org/10.5124/jkma.2012.55.9.812

Ji-Hwan Hwang, MD ¹^,²

¹Executive Board Member of Health Policy, Korean Medical Association, Seoul, Korea.

²Seoul Crystal Skin Clinic, Seoul, Korea.

Corresponding author: Ji-Hwan Hwang, hjihwan@naver.com

Received 2012 August 25; Accepted 2012 September 01.

Abstract

In 2012, the Korean government and various civic groups are insisting to increase in the number of Korean medical graduates by 20% to 100% because of the shortage of public healthcare doctors. However, we have to think of the real point of what makes the pulic heathcare system. In fact, Korea is the country with the least public spending on health care within the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Moreover, the problem with Korean public healthcare are many and profound; regional disparity of medical personnel including doctors and nurses, out-rageously low spending on the public healthcare sector, wrong allocation of public health doctors in lieu of compulsory military service, and no coordination between the public and private health care sector, which thus indicate a very complicated problem with numerous variables. The proper way to solve this problem would be to understand these variables and act accordingly.

Keywords: Public healthcare; Number of doctors; Public health doctor

References

1. Research Institute for Healthcare Policy. A study of current state of the public health doctors 2011. Seoul: Korean Medical Association;

Article information Continued

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.