Seoul: The state audit agency on Thursday released findings that the previous Yoon Suk Yeol administration’s decision to increase the medical school enrollment quota by 2,000 seats annually lacked proper grounds.
According to Yonhap News Agency, the Board of Audit and Inspection (BAI) conducted an audit into the process leading up to the February 2024 decision, which prompted fierce backlash from the medical community and severely disrupted health services for months due to a prolonged walkout by junior doctors.
The government later canceled the plan, returning the quota to the previous level of 3,058. In a report on the findings, the BAI said the health ministry’s estimate that there would be a shortage of 15,000 doctors in 2035 — which was the basis for the 2,000-seat increase — lacked logical consistency as the figure was a simple addition of a 10,000-person shortage predicted by research facilities and a 4,786-person shortage estimated by a commissioned researcher to exist currently.
In particular, the researcher’s figure represented a doctor imbalance between regions, not a shortage across the nation as a whole, it said.
Moreover, the government failed to fully secure procedural legitimacy as it did not discuss the size of the increase with doctors’ groups as previously agreed, and did not give sufficient information and time to a health ministry panel deliberating the decision, it said.
The BAI found additional problems in the allocation of additional seats to each medical school. An allocation committee was formed with seven members mostly from research or public sector backgrounds who had no experience designing or running a curriculum as a medical school professor, according to the agency.
The education ministry also failed to apply the same criteria in adjusting quotas for individual schools, it said.