A team of North Korean medical workers that arrived in Libya earlier this year, is now actively carrying out surgeries, treatments, and consultations, at the Martyr Attia Al-Kaseh Teaching Hospital in Kufra city, southern Libya.
According to the NK News, the hospital uploaded photos on social media last week showing the North Korean doctors receiving patients and assisting with “orthopaedic operations.” Many of the images show graphic surgeries as the North Korean medical workers stood next to the operating table.
The hospital first announced the arrival of the 38-member team in January, a year and a half after North Korea’s Ambassador in Tripoli, Ju Jin Hyok told Libya’s Health Minister that the DPRK “will seek to restore medical cooperation as soon as possible.”
The hospital started training the doctors in mid-January, and assigned at least one DPRK staff member to each shift, “to get them up to speed with their new Libyan colleagues.”
Libyan hospitals relied heavily on North Korean medical professionals before the country fell into a lengthy civil war in 2014. “Many village hospitals in the south do not have doctors because we rely on North Korean doctors [who have left],” one Libyan hospital wrote on its Facebook page in 2016, reported NK News.
According to the World Health Organization’s (WHO) latest healthcare sector analysis, Libya has “severe deficiencies in the mix and distribution of skills across the geographical regions,” worsened by “compromised professionalism, integrity, leadership, and discipline.”
In particular, WHO highlighted that Libya faces a shortage of doctors in the country’s south.
