North Korea used to have a poor medical education system in the 1990s, especially during the Arduous March, or the North Korean famine. Since the ruling of leader Kim Jong-un, however, the North’s medical education has become more modernized, a South Korean report said.
Away from using pictures and videos for medical practice, North Korean hospitals have installed cameras at treatment rooms and operation rooms so that medical school students could see the treatment and surgery directly. North Koreans are using practice models and equipment in medical education. They have also enhanced English education.
According to “An Analysis of the Current State of Medical Education in North Korea” released by the Institute for Health and Unification Studies at Seoul National University’s College of Medicine on Tuesday, Kim ordered in April 2014 to nurture practical and creative human resources and improve higher education in the era of knowledge-based economy. Since then, the North’s medical education has brought about change, the report said.
The report analyzed “Higher Education,” a magazine published by North Korea’s Education Newspaper from February 2015 to September 2017, to gauge the state of North Korea’s medical education.
In North Korea, five- or six-year medical universities educate physicians, Koryo (Oriental) medicine practitioners, oral physicians, and hygiene physicians who are first-class health workers. Three-year medical colleges raise middle-class health workers such as quasi-physicians, prosthetists, and midwives. Two-year nursing schools and six-month nursing training schools bring up nurses as assistant health workers.
Under the North Korea’s policy to universalize and integrate tertiary education, each region is building a new comprehensive university. Medical universities, medical colleges, and universities of pharmacy are being integrated into regional universities, according to the report.
North Korea’s medical teaching method has changed as well. Medical schools there are actively trying out combining other subjects with medicine, such as teaching mathematics with clinical medicine. These schools also reinforced foreign language education, including English. At the microbiology class of Pyongbuk Comprehensive University’s College of Medicine, professors assign students to translate the latest copies of English books and magazines on microbiology into Korean.
The report said it was noteworthy that North Korean medical schools were utilizing computers for training. In Pyongyang University of Surgery’s gynecology courses, professors dropped the old way of repetitive explanation with pictures and models. Instead, they adopted “multimedia-edited motion pictures” in lectures and practical exercises.
For medical practice, North Korean schools are increasingly creating practice models and training equipment.
Sinuiju Medical College made a “labor contraction-inducing stimulant” to observe the characteristics of labor contractions in the obstetric class. Wonju Medical University installed cameras in the hospital outpatient clinic, the abdominal ultrasound lab, the test lab, and the operating room, to allow students to watch treatments and surgeries through TV at the lecture room.
“We need to analyze North Korea’s higher education and medical education continuously, make the most of the North’s media such as Korean Central News Agency and Rodong Sinmun and North Korean defector physicians’ testimonies, and check the North’s medical education to correct errors of the previous analysis,” the report said. “Then, we should compare the status of medical education in the North to that of the South, to continue to analyze detailed similarities and differences in educational content and form and medical infrastructure.”