Debate Over Expanding Medical School Admission Quotas in Korea: In 2024, the Korean Ministry of Health and Welfare enforced a policy to increase the number of medical school students by 2,000 over the next 5 years, despite opposition from doctors. In Korea due to the policy of increasing the number of medical school students by 2035.
Debate Over Expanding Medical School Admission Quotas in Korea
National Health Insurance Corporation and The Korean Medical Association were used for estimation, supply and demand. The Inflow-outflow method was used for supply estimation and assumptions were made regarding the national medical examination pass rates, clinical Physician consultation rates and overseas emigration rates.
Background
- Maintaining an appropriate physician workforce, an indispensable fundamental element in providing healthcare service to the public is essential for efficiently responding to the ever-increasing medical demands and ultimately for establishing and implementing sustainable healthcare policies.
- A systematic and long-term national plan is necessary to make sure that the physician workforce acquires the necessary expertise to serve as human resources in the field. Otherwise, the resulting harm is borne entirely by the citizens.
- Therefore many countries have included physician workforce planning in healthcare reforms.
- However, simply increasing medical school admission quotas does not produce the types of physicians desired by society in the short term. Manby development countries predict the appropriate number of physicians by considering social circumstances at the government level and establishing supply and demand plans.
- However, In Korea, policies for the physician workforce have been unplanned and promoted based on changes in administration.
- However, by 2025, the medical school quota is set to 1,509, reflecting the opinions of the Ministry of Education and Medical Schools.
- This study aims to predict the trend of the government`s policy of increasing the medical school admission quotas.
Methods
Data from multiple sources, including the Ministry of Health and Welfare, National Health Insurance Corporation and the Korean Medical Association, were used to estimate supply and demand. The inflow-outflow method was used for supply estimation and assumptions were made regarding national medical examination pass rate, clinical physician consultation rates, and overseas emigration rates. Per capita, medical use by gender and age group in 2022 was calculated for demand estimation of future medical use, and the results of future population projections were applied there in Korea.
Results
- This study projected that supply and demand both are differences in the physician workforce by estimating the annual active and required active physician supply using the increase in medical school admission quotas as the main scenario.
- The project numbers of active physicians are 119,318 in 2025, 133,117 in 2031 and 142,173 in 2035. In Scenario 1 using 265 working days the number of required physician workforce shortages of 10,020 in 2025. In scenario 2, using 275 working days, the requirement number of physicians was 124,635 in 2025 and 146,342 in 2035.
- The Korean gov. policy is to increase medical school admission quotas by 2,000 students annually for 5 years, but for 2025, it announced an increase of 1509. The annual active physician supply projections according to this policy are shown in the table.
- If the number of medical school students has increased for five years and the public`s medical use behaviour and the number of working days for five years and the public`s medical use behaviour and the number of working days for doctors are maintained at the current level. There is a possibility that there will be an oversupply of as many as 11,000 doctors by 2035.
Discussion
Despite opposition from physicians, the Korean Ministry of Health and Welfare has pursued a policy to increase medical school admission quotas by 2,000 students annually over the next five years, based on three physician workforce projection studies. The authors of three research reports that were used by the Korean government to inform the policy of increasing medical school admission quotas expressed opposition to the annual increase of 2,000 students over 5 years.
The present study included 265 working days commonly used in previous studies and the actual working days of physicians to reflect realistic working conditions in the medical field as well as 275 and 285 days.
Conclusion
In this article, we discussed how differences in physician workforce supply and demand would occur with the implementation of unilateral medical school quotas policies in Korea. It is depending on the workday scenario, the medical school quotas policy is projected to result in a shortage of 1300 physicians and an oversupply of 11,000 physicians by 2035.