National Health Priorities under the Kim Jong Un regime in Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), 2012–2018

The National Health Priorities (NHP) 2016–2020 is the healthcare policy which was most recently announced to the international community by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). However, understanding DPRK’s internal and practical perspectives and priorities in the healthcare sector is difficult. Hence, there is a need to analyse domestic documents. One such document is the Sa-seol—a kind of editorial in the first issue of the each quarterly medical journal published in DPRK. We analyse the content of 56 Sa-seol published in eight medical journals during the Kim Jong Un regime (2012–2018), and then classified them in terms of their relevance to each of 12 items presented in NHP 2016–2020. Sa-seol mentioned a total of 612 medical and health issues which could be classified into 12 items based on NHP 2016–2020. We divided the items into three categories of concern in the NHP by summarising the total number of mentions: the areas of the most, medium and least concern. The areas of most concern (development of medical science and technology) are not directly related to the present improvement of health and rather, seem to focus on more future development. The areas of medium concern focused on disease control, health systems and social determinants of health. The areas of the least concern were emergency or disaster response and reproductive health services. This study suggests a two-track approach for healthcare cooperation with DPRK:, a well-balanced approach between ‘present’ and ‘future’ needs.