culture

Doctors and nurses of the examination department are particularly busy among medical workers of the Breast Tumour Institute of the Pyongyang Maternity Hospital.

Because they have face-to-face consultations with lots of women a day as all visitors to the institute come under medical examination before anything else.

They also undertake outreach work to screen all women across the country for breast tumour in March and September every year.

According to doctor Jon Myong Chol, breast screening for cancer is part of a routine checkup system established when the institute was opened in November 2012.

Socialist medicine is preventive medicine and the outreach medical service is aimed at widening the common knowledge of breast diseases among women and detecting and treating early cancers in time through the preventive examination system, he said.

Accordingly, medical workers of the institute go out not only to factories, enterprises and educational and public service institutions where many women work but also clinics in districts for women pensioners and give them medical check-ups.

They also offer short courses and technical guidance to health workers in the relevant sector in each province so that they can carefully screen all women for breast tumour.

“As breast cancer shows no subjective symptoms, many cases develop the disease without knowing it. So we advice all women to visit our hospital and have breast screening every 6 months and detect early cancer patients in time through the outreach programme,” said doctor Kim Un Hui.

She said that thanks to the regular preventive breast screening system, many women have so far been diagnosed with breast diseases in good time and recovered their health.

A mother of a three-year-old child living in Kyonghung-dong, Pothonggang District, Pyongyang, benefited from the outreach medical service.

In March when the head of her neighbourhood unit told her that medical workers of the Breast Tumour Institute of the Pyongyang Maternity Hospital came to the clinic for the examination of breast, she did not have it as she thought she had nothing to do with it, she said.

But she had the check-up on the kind advice of medical workers, she said. “I was really surprised that an early cancer was detected in me unexpectedly and very thankful to the medical workers who gave check-ups to all without missing one of us, women.”

After receiving medical treatment at the institute shortly ago, she is now recovering her health.