The only public institution in South Korea that could train occupational and environmental medicine specialists has given up its status as a training hospital, after failing to recruit a doctor because it could not offer even half the pay available in the private sector. While no immediate shortage of specialists is expected, there are concerns that the public epidemiological investigation function the institution has handled could be paralyzed.
According to materials that Rep. Kim Joo-young of the Democratic Party of Korea, a member of the National Assembly's Climate, Energy, Environment and Labor Committee, received from the Korea Occupational Safety and Health Agency and other bodies on the 16th, the agency's Occupational Safety and Health Research Institute voluntarily returned its designation as a training site for residents in occupational and environmental medicine to the Ministry of Health and Welfare on June 1 this year.
The institute, which since its establishment in 1989 has been the only body in the public sector training occupational and environmental medicine specialists, gave up the designation because it could not find a doctor. Under the law on medical residents, a training site must have at least one supervising specialist, but the institute has been unable to secure one from last year through this year.
Specialists who want to work in the greater Seoul area for high pay have turned away from the institute, the lawmaker's office said. The institute is located in Ulsan, and the salary it offered came to only about 111.66 million won. An official at Rep. Kim's office said that "as of 2022, salaries for specialists in the private sector reached 200 million to 300 million won," adding that "the institute posted recruitment notices four times in total, but there were no applicants at all."
Even if the institute cannot train specialists, concerns about a manpower shortage across the medical sector are limited. According to the Ministry of Health and Welfare's committee on evaluating training environments, there are about 30 training hospitals nationwide. The number of occupational and environmental medicine specialists nationwide has also risen every year, from 460 in 2016 to 689 this year. The institute has produced about one specialist a year, or 29 in total.
What deepens concern is that the institute has taken on difficult epidemiological investigations of industrial accidents that private hospitals are reluctant to handle, such as rare cancers and leukemia among semiconductor workers. With no specialist in place, the institute's investigative capacity is reaching its limits. Of the 22 epidemiological investigations the institute handled last year, 100% exceeded the legal processing deadline of 180 days, and the average processing time was 635.7 days.
"It is a very serious matter that, even as the number of occupational and environmental medicine specialists grows, there are no specialists to carry out public duties such as epidemiological investigations," Rep. Kim said. "At the parliamentary level, we will provide sweeping support in budget and institutional terms to bring about the restoration of the institute's training site status and the normalization of its public functions."
