Elderly South Korean woman dies after 5-hour wait for hospital that can perform heart surgery amid doctors’ strike
- First responders had called six hospitals in South Gyeongsang province for her treatment, but all turned down the request
- The country’s healthcare system is reeling from a weeks-long junior doctors’ strike that has caused cancellations of medical procedures
An elderly South Korean woman has died following a five-hour wait to find a hospital that could take her in for heart surgery as a weeks-long doctors’ strike continues to cripple the country’s healthcare system.
The patient last month contacted emergency services after she experienced chest pains while working at a farm in Gimhae, about 300km from Seoul.
First responders had reached out to six hospitals in South Gyeongsang province for her treatment, but all of them turned down the request.
A hospital in the nearby city of Busan agreed to take in the woman in her 60s, although it did not have the resources to carry out the procedure.
She then underwent multiple medical tests for more than two hours and was diagnosed with aortic dissection (a condition in which a tear occurs in the inner layer of the body’s main artery) before being rushed to another Busan hospital, where surgery was available.
However, the woman died at night while being prepared for the operation.
Her death comes as hospitals in South Korea reel from February’s walkout by thousands of interns and resident doctors to protest against the government’s plan to boost medical school admissions.
President Yoon Suk-yeol’s administration says a proposal to add 2,000 more seats to medical schools is aimed at fixing a shortage of doctors in one of the world’s fastest-ageing societies, but junior doctors argue their pay and working conditions need to be improved first.
Dozens of medical professors have also quit en masse in support of the strike that has caused hundreds of cancelled surgeries and other treatments at hospitals and swamped doctors, including resulting in the death of an ophthalmologist who shared the workload at a hospital’s emergency department in Busan.
The heart patient’s daughter expressed anger over the delay in admitting her mother to a hospital, saying the lack of availability of surgeons might have worsened her condition, Yonhap reported.
“I am very upset and sad at the thought that my mother may have survived if she had been admitted to a general university hospital in the first place,” she said.
“It’s deplorable that the possibility of her survival may have been lost due to the medical vacuum, although I cannot say for sure that she would have survived if she had been immediately operated on.”
Yoon, smarting from his ruling party’s drubbing in the general election, has pledged to reform state affairs but remained defiant on the walkout that the Korean Medical Association said would not serve the purpose, urging him to scrap the plan and engage in talks with the doctors.
On Wednesday, the Medical Professors Association of Korea called on the presidents of universities to halt the expansion of admission quotas, while a group representing thousands of students said it would make a similar plea before a court next week.
The government earlier said it would suspend the licences of striking junior doctors after they missed the February 29 deadline to return to work.
More than 1,000 trainee doctors have also filed a complaint against second vice-health minister Park Min-soo for alleged abuse of power, saying they would not resume work until he was sacked.
