The Ministry of Health and Welfare said on the 11th that 60 training hospitals have been selected for the "resident training environment innovation support project," launching full-scale efforts to improve the training environment.
The project will invest a supplementary budget of 117.5 billion won to prioritize building training systems for interns and eight specialties. The eight specialties eligible for support are internal medicine, surgery, obstetrics and gynecology, pediatrics and adolescents, emergency medicine, cardiothoracic surgery, neurology, and neurosurgery. Participating hospitals will receive support for allowances for attending physicians who supervise residents and for education operation expense.
Residents are physicians who graduated from medical school and passed the national exam, completing one year as an intern and three to four years as a resident depending on the specialty at a training hospital. Amid medical-labor strife over the medical school enrollment quota, residents left training hospitals over the past year and have recently returned. Residents have demanded that the government and hospitals improve poor training conditions, including excessive workloads, legal liability, and low pay.
Under this training-environment support project, attending physicians who supervise residents will divide roles into a "chief supervising attending physician," who oversees resident training, and an "education-dedicated supervising attending physician," who handles resident education and counseling, to run training systematically.
Interns previously had no assigned supervising attending physician or were guided under hospital-specific systems, but participating hospitals will now designate supervising attending physicians dedicated to interns. The project will also support the construction and renovation of resident study rooms and lounges.
Kim Guk-il, director general for health care policy at the Ministry of Health and Welfare, said, "This innovation support project will serve as a springboard for residents to grow into capable medical personnel who will lead the future health care system," adding, "We will carry out the project without a hitch to drive tangible changes on the training front and will gather sufficient on-site feedback to operate it in an evolving manner."