The National Health Insurance Service (NHIS) said it has established a health insurance service center in Seoul to provide better services for foreigners who are eligible for the state health insurance system. About 50 government officials, including NHIS President Kim Yong-ik, celebrated the opening of the service center in Guro-dong, Guro-gu, in Seoul, on Friday. The district is easily acces
The once-frozen inter-Korean relations are thawing after the inter-Korean summit and the summit between North Korea and the U.S. The two Koreas are seeing progress in discussions for economic cooperation and reunion of families separated by the Korean War. On July 4, the South and the North met in Pyongyang for a friendly basketball game. Exchanges and cooperation in the healthcare sector are like
Koreans are increasingly calling for legalizing the use of marijuana for the medical purpose, especially after news broke recently that the U.S. authorities approved the first drug comprised of an active ingredient derived from marijuana.Last month, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration gave the green light to Epidiolex, made out of a marijuana extract cannabidiol (CBD), to treat seizures asso
The once-frozen inter-Korean relations are thawing after the inter-Korean summit, and the summit between North Korea and the U.S. The two Koreas are seeing progress in discussions for economic cooperation and reunion of families separated by the Korean War. On July 4, the South and the North met in Pyongyang for a friendly basketball game. Exchanges and cooperation in the healthcare sector are lik
An obstetrics and gynecology physician said Korea should legalize abortion and guarantee women’s health rights by widening abortion choices such as approving an abortion pill.She claimed that the current law banning the artificial termination of pregnancy fails to reflect reality.Yoon Jeong-won, women affairs head of the Association of Physicians for Humanism, made the assertion at a d
About half of medical school students suffer human rights abuses such as insults and sexually discriminative language at least once a month during hospital training, a survey showed.The Korea Medical Student Association (KMSA) surveyed medical students who received eight-day medical training at a hospital from April 26 and disclosed the results on Tuesday.A total of 571 medical students ac
About 42 percent of North Koreans who have defected to the South are suffering from somatization, and the nation should provide them with both psychological and physical treatments, a medical professor said. Somatization refers to the expression of psychological problems as physical symptoms.Kim Seok-ju, a professor of the mental health department at Sungkyunkwan University’s School of Med
Medical school students in Korea announced that they supported a recent petition to the Constitutional Court to scrap the law banning abortion. The petition was submitted by an obstetrics and gynecology doctor, who was indicted for performing 69 abortions from November 2013 to July 2015 at the request or with the approval of women.The Korean Medical Student Association (KMSA) wrote in its
Korean cancer patients are calling for the government to expand insurance coverage for immunotherapy, a new type of revolutionary but expensive treatment that boosts the immune system to fight tumors.On Cheong Wa Dae’s online bulletin board for the public petition, a petitioner demanded on April 25 that the health authorities increase reimbursement on immunotherapy and indications for last sta
North Korean defectors had a three times higher suicide rate than South Koreans, said a North Korean defector and head of a women’s group for human rights of North Korean female defectors living in the South.Nam Young-hwa, president of the Women’s Association for the Future of Korean Peninsula, cited a 2015 report on “Causes of deaths of North Korean defectors” released by the Ministry of Unif
Underweight people are more likely to be dissatisfied with life and commit suicide in Korea, a recent study showed.The research team, led by Hong Jin-pyo, a professor at psychiatry department of Samsung Medical Center, surveyed 5,905 Korean adults aged between 18 and 74 for the “Korean Epidemiologic Catchment Area Replication.”The researchers analyzed the association between body mass
Yonsei University Health System said it would spend more than 2 billion won ($1.87 million) in the next 10 years to train 100 medical school students from developing countries suffering from low healthcare benefits.Named as “Project Avison 10 by 10,” the program aims to produce 10 professionals each year for a decade and become a new model of a medical missionary, the YUHS said.Yonsei
Training hospitals are increasingly changing the way they train interns, giving them “doctors’ work” more.Some are reducing chores and letting interns participate in simple operations with others revising their training system to help interns learn key clinical subjects such as internal medicine and pediatrics.Recently, Seoul National University Hospital held a meeting of “Education Traini
Korea’s nursing community pledged to root out the "taeum” (burn-to-ashes) culture that led a nurse at Asan Medical Center to commit suicide in February, by reforming work rules and protecting the nurses’ rights. Their move came as critics pointed out that the nurses’ bullying culture stemmed from harsh working conditions. The government also recently announced measures to improve nurses’ work
The recent suicide of nurse Park Seon-woo at Asan Medical Center has shed light on the bullying culture among nurses, prompting more nurses to call on the government to improve nursing conditions at hospitals. Nurses have taken to the street over the weekend, holding candle lights, white chrysanthemum, and a placard saying “No more death.”Dubbed “taeum,” meaning “burn-to-ash” in Korean, th
Nurses are vehemently protesting the police’s recent comments that they might impose charges of involuntary manslaughter against the nurses and nursing assistants who survived the fatal hospital fire in Miryang.“Not only doctors, nurses, and nursing assistants but all the hospital employees must rescue patients. If they did not actively try to save patients, they could face involuntary manslau
One year has passed since the legislation of the Act for the Improvement of Training Conditions and Status of Medical Residents but trainee physicians still suffer from demanding work environment, a recent survey showed. Medical interns and residents work 84.9 hours a week on average, and many of them work more than 100 hours a week.The government started to enforce the Medical Resident Act on
The steep rise in flu cases in late last year has slowed this month, government data showed Monday. The nation had suffered a nine-fold surge in flu cases in December from the previous month.According to the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s weekly tracking of infectious diseases, 72.1 patients out of 1,000 outpatients had the flu in the first week of 2018 (between Dec. 31 and
Flu cases in South Korea rose nine folds in December from the previous month, most commonly appearing among children aged 7 to 12, government data showed Monday.According to the weekly data of infectious diseases from the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 71.8 patients among 1,000 outpatients had the flu in the 52nd week between Dec. 24 and Dec. 30, 9.3 times more than 7.7 pati