Paid job posting issued but no inquiry calls received
Nighttime medical services suspended for three months due to doctor shortage
Gyeonggi Provincial Medical Center Anseong Hospital is facing difficulties such as suspending night-time pediatric and adolescent care for three months because it has been unable to hire even one pediatric and adolescent specialist despite offering a high salary.
On the 18th, Yonhap News reported that since February, the hospital has been posting job advertisements on a recruitment site mainly used by doctors, paying as much as 1.98 million KRW over three months for a main banner paid ad (6 weeks) and a free ad (6 weeks), but has not received a single inquiry call so far. According to the job posting, the annual salary for a pediatric and adolescent specialist is around 260 million KRW.
Anseong City and Anseong Hospital have been providing night-time pediatric and adolescent care since October 18 last year to expand regional public medical services. This was possible because the city enacted the 'Ordinance on Public Health Care' in July of the same year as part of a project to create a child-friendly city, establishing a basis to support public medical institutions offering night-time pediatric and adolescent care. With the ordinance in place, the city supports Anseong Hospital with funds including personnel costs for pediatric and adolescent specialists and nurses, and the hospital has been providing daytime care on weekdays as well as night-time pediatric and adolescent care until 10 p.m.
However, despite these efforts by the city and the hospital, the pediatric and adolescent department at Anseong Hospital had no choice but to suspend night-time care due to a shortage of specialists. The department originally had three specialists. But in February, one specialist suddenly resigned, and another specialist who was dispatched from a university hospital returned to the university hospital after the dispatch period ended, leading to the suspension of night-time care from March 4. The university hospital that dispatched the specialists has recently been unable to send additional personnel due to the collective resignation of residents following the medical school enrollment increase policy. Accordingly, Anseong Hospital has been continuously requesting the dispatch of specialists from the university hospital while also seeking to hire one specialist.
Gyeonggi Provincial Medical Center Anseong Hospital Recruitment Announcement[Image source=Anseong Hospital announcement capture, Yonhap News]
Photo by Yonhap News
A representative from Gyeonggi Provincial Medical Center Anseong Hospital told Yonhap News, "We started night-time pediatric and adolescent care in collaboration with the local government, but due to a shortage of doctors, we are currently unable to operate it," adding, "In the past, we used to receive quite a few phone inquiries when recruiting doctors, but this time, strangely, we have not received any contact at all." The representative also said, "We are currently consulting with headhunting firms to hire a specialist as quickly as possible."
Meanwhile, recently, it has become frequent for local medical centers to offer multi-hundred-million KRW salaries or post multiple job advertisements due to a lack of doctors. The reasons doctors avoid working in medically underserved areas include living infrastructure incomparable to Seoul and the metropolitan area and relatively poor working conditions. Even retired or soon-to-retire doctors preferred working in Seoul or Gyeonggi areas rather than in rural regions.
The Department of Psychiatry at Seogwipo Medical Center in Jeju Special Self-Governing Province struggled to hire doctors despite doubling the annual salary from 150 million KRW in the initial job posting in September 2021 to 300 million KRW in a re-advertisement last August. Also, Sokcho Medical Center in Gangwon Province posted a job advertisement last year offering 400 million KRW annual salary for an emergency room doctor, but it took as long as three months to complete the hiring.
In response, the Chungbuk Danyang County Health Medical Center, scheduled to open in July, posted a job advertisement offering doctors an annual salary of over 300 million KRW along with benefits such as an apartment and a villa. The initial salaries proposed by the county were 384 million KRW for emergency medicine, 366 million KRW for internal medicine, and 264 million KRW for psychiatry. However, after failing to find one emergency medicine specialist, they posted a fourth re-advertisement and only after raising the salary to 403.2 million KRW did an applicant appear.
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