The year 2023 marked significant transformations in the medical and pharmaceutical sectors. Despite facing resistance from the medical community, President Yoon Suk Yeol's administration declared its intention to increase the number of medical school seats starting in 2025. Additionally, 2023 witnessed the opening of the digital therapeutics market. The initiation of telemedicine this year led to an ongoing conflict between the medical community, opposing such practices, and the Ministry of Welfare, advocating for them, expected to persist into 2024. In the pharmaceutical industry, numerous domestic companies ventured into the global market. Korea Biomedical Review has compiled the 10 most noteworthy healthcare developments in 2023. -- Ed.

This year, alarm bells have been ringing across healthcare fields, warning against an essential care collapse crisis. The shunning of "vital departments" has led to cracks in the healthcare system, and the weakest link has begun to break.

From the "open-and-run" phenomenon, in which people queue up early in the morning before the clinic even opens to receive pediatric care, to "emergency room pilgrimages" due to the inability to find an available emergency room, and to the death of a nurse hit by a cerebral hemorrhage at Asan Medical Center in Seoul, the essential care scene has been eventful.

The pediatrics department was the first to face a crisis, as it had been unable to recruit specialists for several years.

The pediatrics department has long been understaffed, with professors’ on-call becoming a routine. The number of professors leaving the field due to "burnout" has also increased. Hospitals have restricted pediatric inpatient care or cut back on pediatric emergency room services as they run out of capacity.

Most recently, the Pediatric Emergency Center at Soon Chun Hyang University Hospital Cheonan gave up some services due to a shortage of pediatricians. It's not just pediatric emergency rooms. In March, Sokcho Medical Center in Gangwon Province was forced to shorten its operations for over a month due to a long vacancy of emergency medicine specialists.

Even salaries in the hundreds of millions won cannot solve the problem of avoiding essential medical care. One of the reasons for evading essential medical care is the “judicial risk.” Doctors are forced to pay hundreds of millions of won in damages in civil and criminal lawsuits.

Against this backdrop, the government is promoting measures, such as improving the pediatric medical system, supporting essential medical care, and strengthening state responsibility for unavoidable delivery accidents to solve the problem of essential medical care. However, some experts call for strong compensation measures to help physicians feel the direct effects of such steps in the medical field.

These experts also stressed the need to exempt doctors from criminal penalties for medical malpractice and medically unrecognized practices so that they can work with "pride."