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STORY: South Korea isn’t training enough pediatric doctors, and that means long waits for care at children’s hospitals.

In a Seoul hospital waiting room, Reuters spoke to Lee Bo-mi, whose three-year-old boy has pneumonia that hasn’t dissipated after weeks of treatment.

“We had to wait about two weeks to secure a hospital bed because there was a long waiting list, so we kept getting rejected for about two weeks. I was really scared. My son was sick.”

The country’s falling birth rate – at just 0.78 babies born to each woman last year - has led to widespread closures of pediatric facilities.

In the five years leading up to 2022, 65 pediatric clinics or hospitals, representing one-eighth of the country’s total, shut down.

Doctors are shunning a field they think has no future.

Starved of resources, patients and their parents are paying a sometimes grim price.

In May, a five-year-old child in Seoul died after failing to find a bed in multiple hospitals.

Doctors like Choi Yong-jae worry incidents like that will only increase.

“Patients are dying. They die while bouncing around multiple emergency rooms, die when it's not a serious disease, it's a travesty."

So why aren’t more doctors in South Korea drawn to pediatrics?

Part of the problem is the low fees in its universal health care:

When it comes to children, South Korea’s insurance system expects a high volume of patients at a low cost, and that made sense when the birth rate was stable.

But as Dr Lim Hyun-taek explains, it hasn’t been revised to reflect South Korea’s situation now.

“In foreign countries, the government pays enough to maintain a children's hospital, even if you see 20 patients a day. But it's about $10 per treatment in South Korea, which is not enough to run a children's hospital. So clinics have to see about 80 patients.”

That means income prospects for pediatricians also rank lowest compared to peers.

Official data shows they make 57% less than an average doctor’s salary.

Compared to a 97% intake rate for pediatric residents a decade ago,

it’s now tumbled to just 16% in the first half of the year.

And it creates a vicious cycle, where parents are discouraged from having more children, seeing as there’s fewer doctors and hospitals to care for them.

South Korea’s health and welfare minister Cho Kyoo-hong earlier this year said they’ll step up measures to improve care.

Proposals include more state-backed centers and facilities for emergency pediatric treatment.

But talent has already left the pool, according to the Korean Pediatric Association.

It says 90 percent of their members have closed their businesses or left the practice.

The group held seminars last month to help members familiarize themselves with better-paying fields, and roughly 600 of its 3,000 members flocked to hear talks on skin beauty procedures like botox and adult chronic diseases.