KHMU Enters 20 Day Action Campaign for Establishment of Special Act on Support of Healthcare Human Resources
○ KHMU launched the 20-day long campaign called “Beautiful Miracle, 20 Day Action” to urge lawmakers to establish a special act to support healthcare workers.
○ President Yoo stressed, “Hospitals’ mission is to take care of health and lives of patients. But, medical staff is not kind and medical consultation ends in 3 minutes without sufficient explanations about patients’ illnesses and medical treatment that patients would receive. And due to the shortage in manpower in hospitals, less profitable departments were shut down and medical accidents have been increasing, doing harm to patients. The number of hospital workers is only a half or even one third of those of other hospitals in OECD countries. To secure a sufficient number of hospital manpower and address relevant issues, a special act to secure and support healthcare workers is a must.
○ Under the special act, the government needs to investigate the current situations of manpower in hospitals, set up a systematic measure to secure a sufficient number of medical staff; and help hospitals hire more workers. Being the best act to create jobs, it also should serve to prevent another chaos that was seen during the outbreak of MERS, prevent medical accidents thereby saving more lives, provide sufficient care to patients at the hospital level so patients and their families don’t have to suffer the cost burden of caregiving service, enhance the quality of medical service quality to satisfy both patients and medical staff, address the issues of imbalances in medical services and service gap between rich and poor, and create more decent jobs.
○ KHMU believes “It is the golden time to address the problems resulting from the manpower shortage.” So it plans to accelerate its effort with 20 day-long action that contains signature campaigns, meetings with the government and the National Assembly, debate sessions, street protest and activities to convince the public so that the special act can be legislated in the regular session of the 19th National Assembly, which takes place after the general election.