South Korea’s medical community is pushing back hard against a police raid on a pediatric emergency center, carried out late last month as part of an investigation into a baby’s death at Ajou University Hospital, the Chosun Ilbo reported.
On Saturday, NGP, or Nextgen Pediatrics, a group formed by pediatric residents during the country’s doctors’ walkout, issued a statement demanding that the police and the courts explain how patient safety figured in the warrant’s review and execution — and that they answer for it.
The group asked why officers had to occupy computers used for prescriptions while emergency care was underway, and whether records could have been obtained any other way. Under medical law, it noted, hospitals must preserve records before and after any change, and the electronic records system permanently logs every addition or edit, with the time and the author. “We cannot help but ask whether it was truly necessary to occupy a treatment room and threaten patient safety at the very moment emergency care was being provided,” the group said. It called for a formal apology, an accounting of the disruption to care and responsibility for any harm to patients.
NGP also urged the police and the Ministry of Health and Welfare to write concrete procedures for searching a hospital that is actively treating patients: prior coordination with the physician in charge, guaranteed access to the computers and equipment care requires, and a halt or adjustment of the search if an emergency arises.
The group took aim at the investigation itself. It said it opposed “presuming medical error from treatment outcomes alone and pursuing criminal liability first,” arguing that investigators weigh neither how sick the patient was, nor what the doctors knew at the time, nor the limits of modern medicine. “If treating critically ill patients can always come back as investigation and punishment, and if that investigation can halt the care of the patient in front of you, who can keep doing critical and emergency care?” the statement said. “You cannot show young doctors this reality and then ask them to stay in essential medicine.”
The group closed on plainer terms. “We chose this path because we did not want to turn away a sick child in front of us, and wanted to guard that child’s life with all our strength,” it said. “What is needed now is a treatment environment that can protect the young doctors who want to stay by those children.”
The Korea Pediatric Hospital Association, which counts about 100 children’s hospitals as members, put out its own statement the same day. It warned of a repeat of what followed the neonatal deaths at Ewha Womans University Mokdong Hospital, when criminal liability after infant deaths drove residents away from pediatrics and, in the association’s telling, began the collapse of essential pediatric care. “We strongly urge that this be recognized as a matter that will determine the sustainability of essential pediatric care in the Republic of Korea, and that responsible measures be prepared,” it said.
The association said investigation and objective fact-finding are necessary. But it called for a professional system that can tell an unavoidable outcome in emergency care from a clear criminal act, rather than equating a patient’s death with a doctor’s guilt, and for searches to be conducted with the least possible intrusion on patients.
Its fear is a spiral of defensive medicine: pediatric emergency centers that refuse severe cases push them onto regional children’s hospitals, which in turn send families wandering back to bigger hospitals. “Doctors are trained not to avoid difficult patients but to find a way to save them to the last moment,” the association said. If aggressive treatment of the critically ill keeps ending in raids and prosecution, the lesson young doctors absorb is to turn those patients away. “That,” it said, “is not the failure of medicine but the failure of the medical system.”