Last Children's Day holiday, a 5-year-old child died of acute laryngitis. There was an 'emergency room hit-and-run' in the process. The 119th paramedics checked the four emergency departments of the University Hospital but were told they could not be treated, and the fifth was able to be treated at the University Hospital on the condition that they could not be admitted.

The professor of pediatrics at the fifth hospital says he was discharged after his condition improved after normal medical care. Looking at the medical records, it appears that the pediatric professor provided appropriate care.


What was the problem?

But there is something to be regretted. When the child was discharged from the hospital in the early morning, his condition had deteriorated. She called the hospital again, and the hospital said she could see her again but that she could not be admitted. What was my mother's mind like at this time?

You may have remembered the night before when you rode the 119 through the emergency rooms. The sight of the child struggling in the ambulance must have been terribly painful. That evening, the child's condition deteriorated suddenly, and when 119 arrived, his heart had stopped and he was pronounced dead at the hospital.


To explain a little more - the Department of Human Services is not an 'emergency room hit-and-run'

The Department of Health and Human Services announced that the death of a 5-year-old child was not an "emergency room hit-and-run" death. The Department of Health and Human Services said 119 did not die in the emergency room because they contacted five hospitals, A, B, C, D, and E, by phone. This statement is false.

The ambulance carrying the 5-year-old child arrived at the emergency room of Hospital A at 5:6 on May 22 and was admitted at 38:22. While waiting at Hospital A, I called Hospitals B, C, D, and E, and Hospital E said, "I can't be admitted, but I can be treated."

The Department of Health and Human Services did not mention this in its press release. The reason for the death of the 40-year-old child was concluded to be "not an emergency room hit-and-run." Even if the conclusion of the Ministry of Welfare is so, in the eyes of the public, stopping an ambulance carrying a young patient who is in a hurry for one minute and one second on the side of the road and checking from one hospital to another on the phone is itself an "emergency room hit-and-run."


One more step - why do these tragedies happen?



I asked them why they had gone to the four university hospitals that night when they said they couldn't accept child emergency patients. Hospital A, which has the largest pediatric emergency beds in the country, had a lot of waiting patients, Hospitals B and C, which do not have a pediatric emergency room, were full of adult patients and had no beds, and Hospital D was "not treating pediatric emergency patients at night."

The fifth hospital, which saw patients but attached a condition of "no admission," says that the pediatric professor on duty treated them normally. He said that saying he couldn't be admitted was a "mistake on the part of the staff."

The number of pediatricians has recently dropped from 4 to three, and the 12-hour pediatric emergency room is sometimes shut down due to "burnout" of medical staff.

Since it is difficult to find a pediatric emergency bed, the 3 paramedics are also looking for a local pediatric hospital that has opened as soon as possible, although there is a principle of "transfer to the emergency room".


Facts and problems - If there are no medical staff, will we increase the number of hospitals?

The government's plan is to create more public health centres for children and more hospitals to treat children at night and on holidays. Let's take a look at the four university hospitals involved in the children who died to see why this doesn't work.

The number of pediatric surgeons is 4 at Hospital B, 0 at C and 3 at D Hospital, 4 in 2th year and 1 in 1st year, respectively, and 4 in 4th year at E Hospital. It's impossible to create a 24-hour, 365-day-a-year on-call schedule with these numbers.

This year, there were 159 seats for all pediatric majors, but only 32 applied. Thirty-eight of the 50 university hospitals did not have applicants. There's a shortage of pediatric staff, and we've put forward a plan to increase the number of children's hospitals, and it's not working.

You can think of a way to bring together pediatric staff scattered from one hospital to another, but it's not that simple. Hospital A, the largest in Korea, has 38 pediatric specialists and 62 specialist doctors. Patients who need CPR are often difficult to approach.


(The rest of the story is from the soup)