Areas of Focus in the DPRK Medical Forefront - Engage Korea

Areas of 

Focus in the DPRK Medical Forefront - Engage Korea




AREAS OF FOCUS IN THE DPRK MEDICAL FOREFRONT
By Charlie Sands June 18, 2019 0 Comments





Podcast with Professor Sands

This podcast is part of an ongoing series of spotlights of how American health professionals and professors are engaging DPRK through the medical forefront.


Dr. Sands has been associated with PUST since 2013 where he served as a professor in the College of Public Health, College of Dentistry, and College of Pharmacy, Division of Medical Sciences. He taught pharmacology and research designed classes, performing needs assessments and health status of DPRK to develop a curriculum for the Colleges of Medicine, Public Health and Pharmacy. He is currently working with the PUST Strategic Planning Committee in developing a new strategic plan for the University. Alongside other physicians, pharmacists, dentists and other professionals, Dr. Sands is training and educating DPRK students outside of DPRK clinical practices.


We’ve asked Dr. Sands to briefly describe some of the challenges in DPRK, particularly in the medical scope of practice and the healthcare field. Based on our conversation with Dr. Sands, we’ve learned that some of the challenges that DPRK is currently facing include the triple burden of communicable diseases, primarily tuberculosis and malaria, noncommunicable diseases and health emergencies. Non-communicable diseases represent the primary determinant of morbidity and mortality in the DPRK, so there has been a greater emphasis of preventing noncommunicable diseases in DPRK’s healthcare and medical education. One of the primary ways to prevent NCD includes implementing screenings, in which adults under 35 years are recommended to screen for cancer, diabetes, chronic respiratory diseases, and injury-related diseases. The goal is to collaborate with WHO and adopt a similar program to their PEN (Package of Essential Noncommunicable) program.


In order to improve the overall healthcare quality, there needs to be an improvement of the quality of healthcare education. One of the goals of improving the medical education is the emphasis of problem solving and critical thinking among the students instead of memorization. PUST professionals and educators are focusing more on encouraging students to acquire skills and competency rather than acquiring facts and knowledge of the clinical topics through memorization. There’s also a lack of evidence based medicine use and more utilization of outdated teaching methodologies.


There are also interesting areas of research in DPRK that are becoming more popular and beneficial to us. For example there is a lot of research and promotion of coreo-medicine, meaning the traditional NK herbal medicine approach or what we might have called previously, Chinese medicine. This is interesting, but one of the problems is that they don’t publish anything internationally so it’s hard to know what they’re doing. And even if you’re in the country getting access to their research is very difficult. But with discussion with the deans at PUST they are very interested in doing some research in the area of drug interaction with Western medicine and traditional coreo medicine. We could benefit from knowing more about this area and join them to do good research. There is also room for improvement in research methodology and collecting accurate data. Developing evidence based research has been a greater focus for DPRK.


Other areas of focus include developing strategies for rational use of drugs and reducing of antimicrobial resistance, which is becoming a big problem. Research related to education about health impacts of climate change is also becoming popular. Research behind the effectiveness of DOTS (Directly Observed Treatment Short-course) medicine program, where patients take TB medicine and observe them, is also being done. WHO is doing a great job introducing research methodology and DPRK Ministry of Public Health is very interested in improving research and making progress. These are some areas of need and how we can contribute and develop a relationship with the DPRK Ministry of Public Health in the future.