South Korea abandons plan to suspend licenses of striking doctors to resolve medical impasse

abcnews.go.com:

South Korea's government has announced it will abandon its plan to suspend the licenses of striking junior doctors to resolve the country’s long medical impasse

SEOUL, South Korea — South Korea's government announced Monday it will abandon its plan to suspend the licenses of striking junior doctors as part of its efforts to convince them to return to work and resolve the country’s monthslong medical impasse.

It wasn’t immediately known whether the thousands of striking doctors would return to their hospitals after the announcement. The government's concession could also invite accusations of unfairness given its treatment of previous labor strikes and of doctors who have already returned to work.

Health Minister Cho KyooHong said the government has decided not to suspend the licenses of the strikers, who are medical interns and residents, regardless of whether they return to their hospitals or not. He said the government will also offer special measures to returnees to minimize the gap in their training and help them obtain specialist licenses in time.

“After painstaking deliberations, the government has reached this decision based on an assessment that minimizing the medical vacuum in the treatment of emergency and seriously ill patients and maintaining a training system to supply specialists at the right time will serve the public interest more than anything else,” Cho said.

More than 90% of the country’s 13,000 medical interns and residents walked off their jobs in February to protest the government’s plan to sharply boost medical school admissions. The walkout has significantly burdened the operations of university hospitals where they were training and threatened to disrupt South Korea’s medical services.

Some