In preparing for the unification of North and South Korea, rather than unilaterally over-writing the North's human resource training system with the South's health care human resource development system, it is important to understand the North's system and its ecology and to achieve a balance by seeking out aspects of each of the systems that could be consolidated with each other. The training period in both the North and South's health care human resource development systems is specified to be 6 years, but there is no system for internships or residencies in the North. South Korea introduced a 6-year system for pharmacist education in 2009, but North Korea has been using such a system since the 1970s (currently 5.5 years). In North Korea, training of health care personnel is conducted at various levels: at universities, at vocational schools, and at institutes for training health officials. Various types of training (daytime training, online, and ad hoc programs) are carried out. Also of interest is the North's licensure examination system. Rather than a state examination system as in South Korea, the North favors a graduation exam given by a national graduation examination committee composed of university professors, which awards both graduation certificates and 'permits,' that is, licenses for doctors and pharmacists. In working out a plan for the integration of the two Koreas' systems based on the study and analysis of the North's educational and testing system for doctors and pharmacists, this paper does not place exclusive focus on the distinctions between the systems or cling to negative views. Rather than claim that unification/integration is a practical impossibility, the paper focuses on the similarities between the two systems and maximizes them to uncover an approach for arriving at solutions. It is hoped that the practical data offered in this paper can contribute to the design of a forward-minded unification/integration model.

Although the state of medicine in North Korea is of great interest, there is little information, if any, about the present state of medicine in North Korea. Even North Korea's laws and regulations on medicine are not publicly available. It is plausible that the dictator's commands or the policy of the Communist Party may be superior to the nation's constitution and laws on medical education and much more. Information is only available from a limited number of publications and mainly from the statements of refugees, which differ greatly among themselves. No one refugee could provide authoritative data or information because they were never in the position to see the larger picture or have experience over the long term. However, what is known is that the major health professions in North Korea include physicians (medical doctors), stomatologists (oral doctors), 'Koryo' doctors (doctors of Korean traditional medicine), midwives, and nurses. The names and the founding year of each of the regular medical schools are listed along with the change and restoration of names of schools. It is known that there have been quasi-physicians and semi-physicians. However, the reasons for any changes that have taken place also remain unknown. The educational system, curriculum, and even the number of years of training needed to qualify to become a physician have varied from time to time.

The government of South Korea and its medical personnel must make a way by which health professionals who have escaped from the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) can play a positive and practical role in unification and south-north medical unification while south-north authority talks on DPRK public health and medicine manpower development are not going smoothly. Medical personnel escaped from the DPRK have to be recruited for the interviewer of the national examination, to improve the accuracy of national examination interviews. For those medical professionals who have escaped from the DPRK with 6 years' medical college education, but failed the interview on the national examination, we propose here a course of 3.6 months for them to have a right to apply the Korean Medical Licensing Examinations (KMLE). We also propose that medical professionals who have escaped from the DPRK who have graduated from a 6-year medical college in the DPRK and who are medical doctors over the fifth grade or with more than 6 years of experience can be qualified as unification medical doctors and be exempted from the KMLE, getting the right to go directly into an internship and residency. They should be permitted to work in manpower development projects for the health professions. They should also be given opportunities such as to become psychiatrists who treat the mental illness of persons escaped from the DPRK and people from North Korea after unification. Medical students in South Korea should earn college credits on the topic of medical unification and not only students, but all South Korean medical personnel, should prepare for north-south medical unification with an open mind. A way for each medical college to participate in DPRK manpower development for the health professions through a memorandum of understanding between the medical colleges of the south and north.

This study aimed to investigate the relationship among the cultural disposition, morality, and psychological health of medical students to determine how these factors might relate to curriculum planning in medical education. Data was collected from a total of 186 medical students. The questionnaire used included the individual cultural disposition scale, the symptom checklist-90-revised, and the defining issues test. To evaluate individual cultural disposition, we classified students into four categories-low, individual, collective, or mixed cultural disposition-using individualism/collectivism and vertical/horizontal dimensions. We found that those who were younger and in earlier academic years had higher collectivism than individualism and the males had higher individualism than the females. There was no difference in morality or psychological health by the students' sex, age, or academic year. Horizontal collectivism and moral judgment showed a statistically significant correlation (r=0.150, p<0.05), as did stage 6 morality and symptoms of damaged psychological health (r=-0.156, p<0.05). Other than these relationships, no significant correlations between cultural disposition and morality or between morality and psychological health were found. Cultural disposition did have correlations with various aspects of psychological health; specifically, the highest correlation coefficients were found in the relationships between phobic anxiety and horizontal individualism, psychoticism and vertical collectivism, and hostility and horizontal collectivism. The four cultural disposition categories showed relationships not with morality but with psychological health factors including depression, anxiety, hostility, and phobic anxiety. We hope the results of this study can be used to improve the curriculum of medical education.

The authors investigated the effect of feedback and remediation after formative assessment (FRFA) by comparing the FRFA score and that of summative assessment (SA) in a course on clinical skills. In March 2015, 33 subjects underwent evaluation of their ability to perform a complex clinical skill using a real-time ready-made mobile assessment form tool, and through e-mail they were supplied with their feedback and final score (the pass group earned 2 points; the intermediate group earned 1 point; the nonpass group earned 0 points) followed by their self-reflection. The nonpass group underwent a re-test and e-mail feedback again until they passed the test, given the ease of performance. In December 2015, the 33 subjects took a 10-item SA, and one of the 10 items addressed a similar clinical skill. The difference between the first score on the FRFA and the score on the SA was evaluated statistically (p=0.05) through data analysis, variance distribution, correlation analysis, and linear regression analysis using SPSS software ver. 16. The increase from the score on the SA to that on the FRFA was statistically significant ($4.5{\pm}9.29$) in the pass group and the intermediate group, and was $29.7{\pm}11.49$ in the nonpass group of the formative evaluation (p<0.001). Using an FRFA could decrease the range in the standard deviation of the score and increase the minimum score among the subjects.