SEOUL — South Korea’s President vowed Monday not to back down in the face of vehement protests by doctors seeking to derail his plan to drastically increase medical school admissions, as he called their walkouts “an illegal collective action” that poses “a grave threat to our society.”
About 12,000 medical interns and residents in South Korea have been on strike for six weeks, causing hundreds of canceled surgeries and other treatments at university hospitals. In support of their action, many senior doctors at their teaching schools have also submitted resignations though they haven’t stopped treating patients.
Officials say they want to raise the yearly medical school cap by 2,000 from the current 3,058 to create more doctors to deal with the country’s rapidly aging population. Doctors counter that schools can’t handle such an abrupt increase in students and that it would eventually hurt the country’s medical…
