KMA: "Independent Projection Shows Oversupply of About 18,000 Doctors by 2040"

"Projection Committee Reflected Actual Workload and AI Impact Conservatively"
"Physical Response if Policy Is Enforced Based on Flawed Projections"

The medical community has announced its own projection, stating that by 2040, there could be an oversupply of nearly 18,000 doctors.

Taekwoo Kim, President of the Korean Medical Association. Photo by Yonhap News

On January 13, the Korean Medical Association (KMA) held a seminar titled "Problems and Alternatives in the Government's Physician Workforce Supply and Demand Projections" at its headquarters in Yongsan-gu, Seoul, in collaboration with the Korean Society for Preventive Medicine and the Korean Association for Policy Studies, where it revealed these findings.

Park Junghoon, Senior Researcher at the KMA Medical Policy Research Institute, commented on the analysis conducted by the Physician Workforce Supply and Demand Projection Committee (the Projection Committee) under the Ministry of Health and Welfare, stating, "Key variables, such as the actual working hours of doctors and the impact of artificial intelligence (AI), were reflected very conservatively." He added, "The medical community, including the KMA, requested that the actual workload for inpatient and outpatient care be taken into account, but due to insufficient data, the workload was calculated based on medical fees. As a result, the costs of expensive tests and equipment used during hospitalization were converted into workload figures."

Previously, the Projection Committee announced that the shortage of doctors in 2040 would range from 5,704 to 11,136. However, at a subsequent meeting of the Health and Medical Policy Review Committee, the lower limit of the shortage was revised downward by nearly 700 to 5,015. The committee explained that the figures changed during the process of updating the referenced data, but the medical community criticized the results as being based on inaccurate projections.

Researcher Park stated that in this latest independent projection of future physician supply and demand, the KMA incorporated its own survey of doctors' working hours, which amounted to 2,303 hours per year. Based on this, if doctors' working hours are assumed to be 40 hours per week (2,080 hours per year), the number of active doctors would be 154,601 in 2035 and 164,959 in 2040.

If, under the same working hours, scenarios involving the rationalization of medical service utilization and more efficient use of resources-such as changes in health care innovation policy-are also applied, the required number of doctors would be only 140,634 in 2035 and 146,992 in 2040.

According to these projections, the KMA stated that there is a risk of an oversupply of up to 13,967 doctors in 2035 and 17,967 doctors in 2040.

The KMA also disclosed the results of projections using the same time series analysis model (ARIMA) as the Projection Committee. However, unlike the Projection Committee, which used historical data from 2000 to 2024, the KMA used data from 2010 to 2023. The reason given was that the longer the data period, the steeper the slope of inpatient days, causing demand to increase more sharply.

As a result, the KMA model projected the required number of doctors to be 140,305 in 2035 and 147,603 in 2040. The Projection Committee's results were 138,206 in 2035 and 149,273 in 2040. Thus, the KMA's projection is higher for 2035, but the KMA claims that the future growth rate is more moderate compared to the Projection Committee's projection.

Taekwoo Kim, President of the Korean Medical Association, stated, "The results of the supply and demand projection models vary greatly depending on the timing, and the projections were conducted hastily with far fewer variables than in other countries." He added, "If the government pushes ahead with policy based on flawed projections, the association will respond with physical measures."