A Look at Health Care Standards in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea and the United Kingdom
--- Dermot Hudson, Editor-in-Chief, Red Banner of Songun theorical e-journal
I recently had some negativeexperience of the declining health care standards in the imperialist West. Here in the UK, although we have an NHS which has been downsized and semi-privatised, the decline of healthcare standards for the popular masses is quite evident.
We were expected to provide our own transport to the hospital and told various items should be provided by ourselves and that anything above the minium basic treatment must be paid for. The hospital seemed to be short of staff and had dirty floors. It was chaotic with a different staff each day. I was told that the hospital actually compared unfavourably with hospitals in many third world countries.
My mind flashed back to my visit to the DPRK in 1996. I remember when a member of my delegation fell ill with gastro enteritis. He was hospitalized.He had his own room free of charge plus a TV again free of charge. He had a medical team of 1 doctor and 2 nurses assigned to him.This was would unthinkable in the UK unless you paid a king's ransom for such treatment! Such treatment is only possible under the popular-centred socialist system of the DPRK.
Pyongyang has an excellent maternity hospital with 1300 beds and a fleet of ambulances and cars. On several occasions heliocopters have been used to transport patients to the hospital. Maybe if they were in London, they would get told to take a taxi!
This maternity hospital is quite a wonderous achievement of socialist construction. 320 pairs of triplets have been born in the Pyongyang Maternity hospital. Some of the triplets only weighed 1.7kg but thrived thanks to the excllent care athe hospital. In fact, out 300 foreign babies have been born in it as well as one south Korean baby.
Pyongyang actually has a higher number of maternity beds per 1,000 of population than certain London boroughs. The London Borough of Greenwich has 37 maternity beds for a population of 250,00 compared to a minium (this excludes beds in polyclinics and district hospitals) of 1,300 beds for a population of about 2 million.
There are also several other hospitals, large hospitals such as the Kim Man Yu hospital, as well as district hospitals and polyclinics. Complimenting this, people in the DPRK also benefit from the section doctor system, which is a unique preventive healthcare system whereby doctors actually make regular rounds of neighbourhoods. They even conduct check ups in peoples homes rather waiting for people to visit for surgery! This is totally unthinkable here in the UK where some NHS GPs do not believe in doing emergency call outs let alone normal check ups!
The number of doctors per head of population in the DPRK is roughly 30 per 10,000. Spending on health care in the DPRK increased by 9.4% between 2004 and 2005 and by 10% between 2005 and 2006.
As you can see, the health of the masses is deeply valued in the DPRK were the people-centred socialism of Juche is in full bloom.