The work, published on Apr. 21, Juche 74 (1985), enunciates the idea that the essence of socialist health service is an honorable and worthwhile revolutionary work to protect lives of people and improve their health.

It also indicates the tasks for developing socialist healthcare system by thoroughly carrying out the party's policy for preventive medicine and improving medical service and ways to do so and principled matters arising in further developing medical science and technology, improving the training of health workers, ensuring material supply to public health and strengthening the guidance to it and ways to do so.

Present at the meeting were Choe Thae Bok, Han Kwang Bok, department director of the C.C., the Workers' Party of Korea (WPK), Kang Ha Guk, minister of Public Health, and officials of public health and those in the fields of medical science and education in Pyongyang.

Choe Thae Bok, member of the Political Bureau and secretary of the WPK Central Committee, said in a report: Kim Jong Il clarified in a unique manner the essence of socialist public health. This was a precious ideological and theoretical feat as he newly formulated the basic principle providing a starting point for the development of Juche-oriented public health and indicated the way for the party and state how to develop healthcare in socialist society.

He referred to the big successes achieved in public health for the past three decades since the publication of the work.

A signal change has taken place in the ideological and moral traits of the health workers, driving force in public health, popular healthcare policies have been enforced without interruption despite stern ordeals and the best Korean-style socialist healthcare system has been consolidated, the reporter said, adding:

A lot of modern healthcare institutions and entertainment facilities for the promotion of health of people and children have sprung up across the country and a fresh turn taken place in healthcare.

The reporter called for giving fuller play to the advantages of the socialist healthcare system in the DPRK.