[Inside Chodong] Hospitals That Bully Nurses Put Patients at Risk

A nurse in her twenties, who had worked at a hospital in Gwangju, Gyeonggi Province, ended her own life last month after resigning as a result of workplace harassment. During her lifetime, she filed a complaint with the labor authorities regarding "taeum" (bullying within the nursing profession). While some instances of harassment were acknowledged by the authorities and the hospital was ordered to rectify the situation, there was no meaningful change. Only after this young nurse's death did the Ministry of Employment and Labor launch a special labor inspection, and the police formed a dedicated investigation team to look into the case—but only after the president issued a public condemnation, stating, "Taeum is a form of horrific violence that can never be justified."

Cases like this are not isolated. In 2018 at Asan Medical Center in Seoul and in 2019 at Seoul Medical Center, nurses ended their lives after being unable to endure persistent bullying. The incidents keep recurring, but working conditions remain unchanged. This is because the fundamental causes of taeum—the shortage of staff and poor working environments—persist. The number of patients a single nurse must care for is still higher than in advanced countries, and the night-and-day-shifting three-shift system along with chronic understaffing are still regarded as matters to be endured through individual sacrifice and perseverance. A significant proportion of new nurses leave the hospital within one year, and even experienced nurses leave the clinical setting, leading wards to be perpetually staffed by inexperienced personnel, thus perpetuating a vicious cycle of repeating the same problems.

More alarming is that this is not solely a problem among nurses. As nurse staffing shortages and accumulated fatigue worsen, patient safety indicators—including medication errors, falls, bedsores, and hospital-acquired infections—deteriorate noticeably. Studies show that the more patients assigned to each nurse, the higher the risk of patient death—a point that underscores how nurse staffing is not just a simple HR issue but a core factor determining the quality of care and patient lives. No matter how dedicated a nurse may be, when faced with workloads that are physically impossible to handle, the likelihood of mistakes increases. Nonetheless, hospital management continues to view nurse staffing only in terms of cost.

Ultimately, putting an end to taeum requires going beyond simply punishing perpetrators to fundamentally changing how hospitals are operated. Under current medical law in Korea, while there are regulations for the total number of nurses in a hospital, there is no legal standard specifying how many patients each nurse in a general ward should care for. On average, one nurse is responsible for more than 10 patients and even more at night, far exceeding the recommended patient-to-nurse ratio of five (as suggested by the government in 2023). As a result, there are growing calls in the field for a realistic nurse-to-patient ratio, for formal recognition of new nurse training as part of standard work, and for the establishment of reasonable compensation systems for night and overtime work. Experts also point out that hospital evaluations should be revised to include not just profitability and bed occupancy rates, but also organizational culture, nurse retention rates, and patient safety levels.

Hospitals are places to save lives. If running a hospital requires exhausting medical staff, patients' safety cannot be guaranteed. This is why taeum must not only be addressed as a matter of improving nurses' working conditions, but recognized as a fundamental issue of medical policy crucial to protecting patient lives.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.