It is amazing how little these doctors in Seoul think of the Hippocratic Oath as they let patients go without care because of their own selfishness:
Doctors at major hospitals in Seoul and its neighboring areas have decided to stage indefinite walkouts, while medical professors resolved Wednesday to join community doctors in a one-day strike next week, demanding the suspension of a medical school quota hike.
In a meeting late Wednesday, professors from the country’s 40 medical schools decided to join the one-day general strike set for next Tuesday, organized by the biggest association of community doctors.
Kim Chang-soo, head of the Medical Professors Association of Korea, told Yonhap News Agency that the association has decided to join the strike, though he said it remains unclear how many professors will actually participate in the walkout.
Yonhap
You can read more at the link.
It is amazing that doctors would just cancel appointments like this at the last minute. Who knows how long some of these patients have been waiting for an appointment before they were cancelled:
Some medical professors at the country’s three major hospitals, Seoul National University Hospital, Severance Hospital and Korea University Hospital, suspended surgeries and outpatient clinics on Tuesday for one day, as previously announced, to protest the government’s plan to expand the number of new medical students by 2,000 a year.
The main hall at SNUH’s Cancer Hospital was without medical staff Tuesday, while a number of patients wandered around the ward, having just learned that the doctors wouldn’t be coming in. Some said they hadn’t been told that their appointments would be canceled or postponed; other said they had to wait in long queues, not knowing when their names would be called.
Korea Herald
You can read more at the link.
The massive protests by Korean teachers has less to do with the recent teacher suicides and more to do with wanting to get the child abuse law changed. None of the teacher suicides has been linked to the child abuse law, but the activists are creating the impression the law caused the suicide to get it changed:
On Saturday, around 200,000 teachers from around the country gathered in Seoul’s Yeouido near the National Assembly to commemorate the recent deaths of teachers and to call for the better protection of their rights.
It is very rare for teachers to stage such a large rally on their own without the involvement of labor unions.
The Education Ministry maintains that any teacher taking a leave of absence to join the collective action will be dealt with sternly in accordance with the law and principles.
Education Minister Lee Ju-ho on Sunday asked for teachers to refrain from taking a leave of absence to attend the planned mass rally while pledging to take measures to enhance their rights and authority in the classroom.
Yonhap
You can read more at the link, but what is going on is that a change in the child abuse law caused any teacher accused of abuse to be suspended. This allowed parents that maybe do not like a teacher to claim abuse of their child to get the teacher suspended until cleared of the abuse allegations. Some of these suspension have lasted an entire year. This has caused teachers to not inflict discipline in classrooms because of fears of being accused of child abuse.
