The labor union at Seoul National University Hospital (SNUH), which had threatened an indefinite strike on May 31, has called off the strike after reaching a tentative agreement with the management.

The Seoul National University Hospital Branch of the Korean Healthcare Workers' Trade Union (KHWU) said it signed a tentative agreement with the hospital management on Thursday and held a provisional signing ceremony.

The agreement calls for the National University Hospitals' Association to recommend that the government not reduce public hospital beds, propose a system to reduce the burden of hospital expenses for children, exclude physician assistants (PAs) from the staffing standards of the nursing grading system and prohibit ordering medical procedures outside their scope of work, and ban imposing status-based disadvantages on employees under the pretext of medical crises.

“The government's healthcare reform plan includes a proposal to reduce the number of beds to prevent patients concentrating in tertiary general hospitals,” the union said. “We reached an agreement for SNUH to take the lead to ensure that public beds are not reduced and have the National University Hospitals’ Association to recommend this to the government.”

The union noted that the government's pilot project converted some nursing staff to PAs. Still, the problem arose because more nurses were not recruited to fill the vacancies left by the ward nurses, so the union ensured that the nursing grading system standards did not include PAs.

The trade union emphasized that its struggle to strengthen public healthcare is “ongoing.”

“This agreement is the result of a persistent struggle to strengthen public healthcare,” it said. “Although there are rooms to be desired, we will continue to struggle for a hospital where patients and workers can be happy and safe.”