A majority of intern physicians run non-work-related errands for seniors, do extra work without pay, and find it almost impossible to take sick leave, a survey found.
As senior physicians greatly influence interns’ careers, interns cannot complain about unfair work. However, in a group chat where interns applying for a particular department and seniors are together, the survey showed that interns have to do extra night duties or work unrelated to medical training.
On Wednesday, the Korean Intern Resident Association (KIRA) released the poll results on the medical training curriculum for interns and their working environment.
The poll focused on 903 interns and residents taking medical training at 137 teaching hospitals nationwide from May 23 to June 3. Among them, 207 were interns.
The survey showed that 50.8 percent of the respondents did work unrelated to intern training. The work included preparing documents for conferences, making excel files, cleaning, doing laundry, ordering food and beverages, and returning borrowed books.
Senior doctors even made interns attend weddings or funerals of strangers and cover class attendance for them. One senior physician asked an intern to drive after a drink-and-dine session.
Unfair work assignments mostly came from residents (90 percent) and professors (29.5 percent). It was relatively rare for nurses (4.7 percent) or fellows (0.6 percent) to assign work unrelated to medical training.
Senior doctors also assigned irrelevant work to interns in a group chat room on Kakao Talk. In addition, they created a separate group chat for interns applying for a specific department and ordered them to do irrelevant work or extra night duties.
Nearly half of the respondents (46.2percent) said the training program's work schedule differed from their actual work. Thirty-five percent had difficulty rescheduling even if they had to take sick leave.
Interns and residents did not get proper guidance on the training curriculum, either.
When asked if they had received the curriculum guidance, 22.7 percent said they did not. In clinical training, 29.8 percent said they did not learn what the curriculum had intended to teach.
KIRA said it would push for an improvement of intern training again, adding it would discuss the issue with the Korean Academy of Medical Sciences and the Ministry of Health and Welfare.
“The internship program, which is supposed to train interns to become general practitioners, has been reduced to a resident selection course. Instead, we should tackle the intern training problem that has been overlooked for the past 10 years,” KIRA said.
It added that the association would demand medical schools clarify the purpose of intern training and ask for the appointment of relevant training directors.