South Korean emergency room medical employees have skilled rising situations of bodily and verbal abuse lately, authorities information confirmed Tuesday.
Medical doctors or nurses had been topic to abuse from sufferers at emergency rooms 707 instances in 2023, up from 602 in 2022 and 585 in 2021, in keeping with Ministry of Well being and Welfare information submitted to Rep. Kim Mi-ae of the primary opposition Democratic Occasion of Korea.
Of the 707 circumstances for final yr, 457 had been associated to verbal abuse. Bodily violence was the subsequent most frequent with 220 circumstances, adopted by menace (51), destruction of kit (34), and different types of violence corresponding to deception. All such situations are stipulated as forbidden motion towards emergency medical employees by Article 12 of the Emergency Medical Service Act.
The determine for the primary half of this yr was 360, with effectively over half of the circumstances (243) associated to verbal abuse. There have been additionally 82 circumstances of bodily violence, 21 of threats and 9 associated to the destruction of kit.
In April of this yr, the husband of an emergency affected person inflicted bodily and verbal violence on a health care provider at a hospital ER in Gangwon Province.
He reportedly known as the physician “chon-nom” — a derogatory time period roughly equal to “hick” in casual English — whereas hitting the physician on the chest. He was indicted for violating the Emergency Medical Service Act in April and is at the moment on trial.
Violating Article 12 is punishable by as much as 5 years in jail or a 50 million gained ($37,900) positive. Whereas Article 6 of the act bans emergency medical personnel from blindly refusing medical providers, it states that they’ll achieve this with “good trigger.”
Final month the ministry distributed its information outlining when providers might be denied, which included situations of bodily violence, threats, harm to medical tools or any motion that hinders the emergency employees from performing obligatory medical procedures.
“The legislation enforces strict punishment for threatening or bodily abusing medical employees, however the scenario stays dire. … There must be a complete measure (on the difficulty) corresponding to a long-term survey on the protection of the medical employees,” Kim mentioned.