The government has sent advance notices of license suspensions to about five thousand trainee doctors who have defied the return-to-work order amid a collective action in protest of a plan to increase the medical school admissions quota. 

After a government meeting on responses to doctors’ collective action on Monday, deputy health minister Jun Byung-wang told reporters that the government finished sending the notices to four-thousand-944 junior doctors on Friday. 

As of 11 p.m. Friday, over 12-thousand trainee doctors at 100 teaching hospitals had left their worksites, accounting for some 93 percent of junior doctors.

Addressing medical professors showing signs of resigning, the deputy minister urged them to protect the trainee doctors who are trying to return to work. Jun also stressed that the government will take lenient measures if trainee doctors return to work before the administrative procedures to suspend their licenses are completed.

The government said that the emergency medical care system is operating normally despite trainee doctors’ collective action entering its fourth week. Jun noted that the number of non-critical inpatients at top-tier general hospitals had decreased by 35 percent, but the number of patients at intensive care units remained at around three thousand, which is similar to usual levels. 

To make up for the shortage of medical staff, the government on Monday dispatched 158 military and public health doctors to 20 local hospitals for a four-week period.