Rural areas suffer a severe shortage of doctors as most prefer to work in big cities.
According to the Korea Medical Association's Research Institute for Healthcare Policy, 75.6 percent of the country's 107,976 doctors worked in big cities like Seoul, Incheon, Daejeon and Daegu as of 2020.
Some 20.4 percent worked in smaller cities and a mere 4,255 or four percent in rural areas.
The concentration in big cities is worse than two decades ago, when the proportion was 63 percent for major cities, 29 percent for smaller cities, and eight percent for rural areas.
Forty-five areas have fewer than one doctor per 1,000 people.
According to the office of lawmaker Choi Hye-young, the small counties of Goseong and Yangyang in Gangwon Province have one doctor for more than 2,000 people, and Danyang in North Chungcheong Province one for over 1,500 people.
Farmers and fishermen often have to travel long distances to the nearest town to see a doctor.
Doctors typically decide where to work depending on their ancestral hometown and medical schools where they trained. Those who train as interns and residents in provincial regions are more likely to work there than those who have trained at hospitals in the capital region.
The institute said, "This suggests that we need to give students from provincial areas more opportunities to get into medical schools in their vicinity and train in hospitals there."
