As the admissions process for 2025 proceeds as planned by the government, “educating 7,500 students.”

On Sunday, the Korean Medical Association (KMA)'s emergency committee said that if the 2025 recruitment cannot be stopped, the government must suspend recruiting new students for 2026.

Unless the government accepts the medical community’s request, medical schools that used to educate 3,000 students yearly will be forced to teach up to “12,500 students” in the 2026 academic year, the nation’s largest doctors’ group said.

Dr. Park Hyung-wook, chairman of the emergency committee, made the remarks at a news briefing after finishing the National Congress of Physician Representatives when asked about the medical community's response if the government pushes ahead with recruiting new students for the 2025 medical school year.

“The government must try to suspend the 2025 medical school recruitment as hard as possible,” Park said. “If it ignores the medical community's warnings and continues with the 2025 medical school recruitment, it should stop the 2026 medical school recruitment and take measures to educate the rapidly increased number of medical students gradually. Only then can conflicts and damage to educational rights be minimized in the long run.”

The KMA will increase contact with the National Assembly and the government to resolve the medical school enrollment quota for 2025. Following a meeting with the chairmen of the National Assembly's Education Committee and Health and Welfare Committee last Thursday, the KMA emergency panel plans to meet with the two committees and the Ministry of Education soon. The KMA will also decide whether to participate in the three-way consultative body with the government and political parties by collecting opinions from its members.

However, the committee says that dialogue and participation in the three-side body will be possible only when the government and political circles recognize that “doctors also are part of the general public. "

“The medical community is talking about ‘doctors are the people, too,'” Park said. “This is the guiding principle. If there is a new three-way council or other consultative body based on this principle, the KMA’s emergency committee or its next executive board should also actively participate in it.”

Park noted that the Education Ministry claims that readjusting the number of students for 2025 is impossible, citing the possibility of a “lawsuit” but brushed it aside as an “excuse.

The emergency committee head then said he is preparing to work with the Medical Professors Association of Korea (MPAK) and the Korean Association of Medical Colleges) to “inform the Ministry of Education again of the impossibility of medical education if the number of students for 2025 is not adjusted.

The noncommittal stance was echoed in a resolution issued after the National Congress of Physician Representatives.

In the resolution, the representatives called for canceling the increase of 2,000 medical students and suspending medical student recruitment for the 2025 academic year as much as possible. “If the government ignores the warning, suspend medical school recruitment for the 2026 academic year and take measures to educate the rapidly increasing number of medical students gradually,” the resolution said

It also called for punishing the ministers and vice ministers of education and health and welfare involved in the conflict and identifying and holding them accountable for the martial law decree that called for the “execution” of doctors and unreturned medical personnel during the short-lived emergency martial law imposed by President Yoon Suk Yeol on Dec. 3.

“Prime Minister Han Duck-soo, who is acting as the president, should apologize to trainee doctors and physicians and thoroughly investigate the process by which such an outrageous statement was included in the decree,” it said.

“Until these demands are fulfilled, the entire medical community will continue to resist and struggle in unison,” it said. “We will take the lead in rebuilding the medical system that the Yoon Suk Yeol government destroyed.”