[Editorial] ER crisis averted

South Korea’s government officials will have been duly relieved to see the result of the five-day Chuseok holiday. Defying dire predictions, the country’s emergency care services continued without massive and paralyzing disruptions.

The Health Ministry said the average number of patients who visited emergency rooms across the nation stood at 27,505 per day, down 31 percent from 39,911 last year. In addition, the latest figure is 25 percent down from the lunar New Year holiday period.

This does not mean that all patients have been promptly accepted by hospitals. Some patients struggled to find a spot for hours, after being repeatedly refused for various reasons.

But it should be noted that the overall public view seems to have changed in connection with the visit to emergency rooms. Before the Chuseok holiday started, government officials encouraged people to refrain from seeking help at emergency rooms if their conditions were relatively mild. The government also gave out a guideline to hospitals, setting rules about denying service to those with mild symptoms.

The cost of emergency treatment has been also hiked for those with mild symptoms, forcing such patients to pay 90 percent of the medical service fees, sharply up from 50 percent.

Incentives were also offered for hospitals which treat patients during the Chuseok holidays in the form of higher compensation backed up by the national health insurance. As a result, about 9,700 hospitals offered services during the holiday, nearly double the number from last year.

All in all, the mix of government initiatives and the shifting public sense about when emergency service is needed has resulted in the relatively smooth operations of emergency rooms at hospitals. This allowed emergency care doctors and medical staff to take care of patients with urgent and life-threatening conditions.

Of course, the positive development does not suggest that Korea’s medical services in general are getting back to normal. The severe shortage of doctors in emergency and essential care departments shows no sign of improvement, a sorry state that traces back to February when trainee doctors left their workplaces in protest against the government’s medical reform plan.

The Yoon Suk Yeol administration had pushed ahead with its ambitious yet controversial plan to increase the medical school enrollment quota as part of efforts to deal with the issues linked to the fast-aging society, greater need for medical care and the shrinking pool of doctors in the demanding medical fields.

The confrontation between the government and doctors dealt a severe blow to patients as the shortage of medical staff at major hospitals resulting in delays and cancellations of surgeries and treatment.

Last week, the government and rival parties proposed a joint consultative body to resolve the protracted dispute over medical school quotas, but the country’s largest doctors’ group refused to join the body.

Although the nation averted emergency room crisis, the medical service debacle is yet to be resolved, a challenging task for the government seeking a breakthrough.

On Thursday, Prime Minister Han Duck-soo admitted the government’s medical service initiative on the Chuseok holiday had a limit.

“The government knows that the response during the Chuseok holiday was a contingency scenario, and that it falls short of the health care required by our people over the long term,” he said at the Cabinet meeting, adding that more progress was needed to ensure a seamless emergency health care system.

The operations of emergency rooms during the Chuseok holiday illustrates the importance of the systematic, role-based medical care service in which small clinics treat those with mild symptoms and big hospitals take care of those with severe conditions. The government must speed up overhauling the insurance compensation schemes that reflect the division of roles, while seeking to negotiate with doctors to end the prolonged medical service disruptions.