How to Verify a Korean Surgeon's Licence and Specialty Registration

What each number represents, which public records exist and what they show, what to ask the clinic to provide, and what an evasive answer tells you.

Asking a clinic to confirm its surgeon's credentials feels, to most patients, faintly rude — as though you were accusing someone of something. It is worth getting past that quickly, because the request is ordinary, the information is not confidential, and a clinic that holds the qualification can supply it in a sentence.

It is also a question with a definite answer. Unlike almost everything else you will weigh when choosing — judgment, communication, whether a plan suits you — this one resolves to two numbers and two dates. That makes it the cheapest useful thing you can establish before you travel.

This page sets out what a licence number and a specialist certificate number each represent, what kinds of public record exist in Korea and what they do and do not show, what to ask the clinic for and in what form, and how to read the answer you receive. What the two titles mean is covered separately, as is how to read the rest of a credential list.

Why the request is ordinary

Three things are worth knowing before you send the message.

The information is not private. A licence number and a specialist certificate number are professional identifiers, not personal data. They exist to be quoted. Clinics display them in Korea as a matter of routine.

The request is not an accusation. You are not suggesting that anyone is lying. You are establishing a fact before making a decision that involves surgery in another country, which is the same thing you would do before any other significant commitment.

The answer is cheap for an honest clinic and expensive for a dishonest one. This is what makes the question worth asking regardless of your level of suspicion. It costs a legitimate clinic thirty seconds. That asymmetry is the entire value of the question.

What each number represents

The two documents are separate, and so are their numbers.

The medical licence number. Issued when the doctor is licensed to practise medicine, after completing medical education and passing the national licensing examination. It identifies the individual as a licensed physician. It says nothing about specialty.

The specialist certificate number. Issued after specialist training in a named field and the corresponding board examination. It is field-specific: a certificate in plastic surgery certifies training in plastic surgery. It carries its own number, entirely independent of the licence number.

Because they are separate documents issued at different times, they are also separate numbers issued in different series. A specialist certificate number is typically a much smaller figure than a licence number, for the straightforward reason that far fewer are issued. This is worth knowing so that a small number does not look wrong to you.

Both carry issue dates, and the dates are as informative as the numbers. The interval between them is the training period, and it should be several years. Two dates close together do not describe a completed specialist path.

What a number can and cannot establish

Be realistic about what you are getting, because the value of this check lies in its specificity rather than in any magic.

What the numbers establish is that a specific claim has been made, in a specific and checkable form, by a clinic that has put it in writing. That is meaningfully different from an adjective. “Highly qualified” commits nobody to anything; “specialist certificate No. 2045, issued 3 March 2014” is a statement that could be wrong, and stating it is therefore an act of a different kind.

What a number by itself does not do is verify itself. A figure in an email is a figure in an email. Its value comes from being specific, attributable, and consistent with everything else the clinic publishes — the dates in the surgeon's career timeline, the years of experience quoted, the training history. Credentials that fit together are harder to fabricate than any single number.

So treat the numbers as the beginning of a check rather than the end of one, and read them alongside the rest.

What public records exist in Korea

Korea maintains public information about medical institutions. It is worth understanding what kind of information that is, because patients frequently expect something the records do not provide.

The public records are largely institution-level. They describe medical institutions rather than individuals: whether an institution is registered and operating, what fields it treats, and how many specialists in each field are attached to it. That is genuinely useful information — an institution recorded as having no plastic surgery specialist is telling you something concrete — but it is not a searchable directory of individual doctors and their certificate numbers.

What that means in practice: the records can corroborate an institutional claim, and they are poorly suited to confirming an individual one. The individual claim is what you get from the clinic, in writing, and what you then check for internal consistency.

We are not printing links to lookup services here, deliberately. Addresses and interfaces for public services change, a stale link is worse than none, and a patient who follows an out-of-date link and finds nothing may conclude the wrong thing. If you want to use the public records, ask the clinic which service is current, or ask a Korean-speaking contact to look with you.

Why the records are harder to use from abroad

Three obstacles, all practical rather than deliberate.

Language. The records are in Korean, and machine translation of an official interface is unreliable in exactly the places where precision matters — field names, institutional categories, and the difference between similar terms.

Names. Korean names romanise several ways. The same surgeon may appear in English as Han Dae-hee, Dae-hee Han, Daehee Han or Dae Hee Han, and searching an English spelling against a Korean record is unreliable. Ask for the name in Korean characters, which removes the ambiguity entirely.

Access. Some Korean online services expect a domestic identity verification method that a foreign visitor does not have. This is not a barrier erected against patients; it is simply how the systems were built.

The conclusion is not that verification is impossible from abroad. It is that the direct request to the clinic is the efficient route, and the public records serve as corroboration rather than as your primary tool.

The four items to ask for

Keep the request short and specific. Vague requests produce vague answers.

1. The full name of the surgeon who will perform the operation, in English and in Korean characters. Not the clinic's director if that is a different person — the person who will operate.
2. The medical licence number and its issue date.
3. The specialist certificate number, its issue date, and the field it is in. The field matters: a specialist certificate exists in many disciplines, and only one of them is plastic surgery.
4. Where the specialist training was completed. The training hospital, which is checkable in a way that an adjective is not.

Ask for it in writing rather than over a telephone call. Not because a spoken answer is less honest, but because you will want to compare it later against what is published, and because numbers transcribed from speech across a language boundary acquire errors.

How to ask so that it gets answered

The phrasing matters more than it should, because a question that sounds like an accusation invites a defensive answer rather than an informative one.

State the purpose plainly: you are travelling from abroad for surgery and are confirming credentials before booking. That is a complete and reasonable explanation, and it makes the request routine rather than pointed.

Ask for the items as a list rather than in a paragraph. A list gets answered item by item; a paragraph gets answered in summary.

Ask early, in your first or second exchange. A credential question raised after weeks of discussion carries an implication that the same question raised at the outset does not.

And ask for the numbers rather than for reassurance. “Is the surgeon board-certified?” can be answered yes. “Could you send the specialist certificate number and issue date?” cannot be answered with a word.

What a clear answer looks like

A clinic that holds the qualification answers directly, and the answer has a recognisable shape.

The specific numbers and dates, given without hesitation or negotiation. The name of the individual surgeon, not the clinic. The field of the certificate named explicitly. Consistency with what is published elsewhere on the clinic's own pages — a career timeline whose dates fit the certificate date, experience figures counted from a stated starting point.

An example of the form: Dr. Dae-hee Han, medical licence 00394 issued 26 February 2009, specialist certificate in plastic surgery No. 2045 issued 3 March 2014, specialist training completed at Ajou University Hospital. Four facts, checkable against each other, given in a sentence.

Note what makes that useful: not its confidence, but its specificity. Every element in it could be wrong, which is precisely why stating it means something.

What an evasive answer looks like

Evasion in this context is rarely a refusal. It is almost always a substitution — an answer to a different question, delivered warmly.

• Adjectives instead of numbers. “Our surgeons are highly experienced and fully qualified.” True, possibly. An answer to your question, no.
• Clinic credentials instead of individual ones. Accreditations, awards, equipment, patient numbers. You asked about a person.
• A change of subject. Prices, availability, a discount for booking this month. Notice the redirection rather than following it.
• “All our doctors are certified.” Certified in what field? And which one is operating on you?
• Deferral to the visit. “We can show you when you arrive.” You are being asked to buy a flight before establishing a fact that fits in one line.
• An unnamed surgeon. If the clinic will not tell you who will operate, the credential question has no subject.

Ask once more, plainly, if you receive one of these. A single unclear reply may be a language problem or a busy inbox. A second one is an answer.

What a clinic that cannot answer is telling you

Consider what the request actually costs on each side.

For a clinic whose surgeon holds the qualification, it costs the time it takes to type two numbers and two dates. There is no reason to withhold them, no competitive sensitivity, and no privacy concern.

For a clinic where the answer is complicated — where the operating surgeon is not the doctor featured in the marketing, or where the qualification is in a different field from the one implied — the request is not trivial at all. It forces a choice between a plain answer and an evasion.

Which is why the response to this one question is unusually informative. You are not only learning the credentials. You are learning how the clinic behaves when asked something specific — and that is a preview of how it will behave when you ask something harder, later, when it matters more.

The consistency check, which costs you five minutes

Once you have the numbers, spend a few minutes reading them against everything else the clinic publishes about the same surgeon. This is where a check stops being a formality and starts doing work.

Do the dates agree with the career timeline? A specialist certificate issued in a given year should sit after the training period described elsewhere and before any position held as a specialist. A timeline that has someone practising as a specialist before the certificate date has an error in it, and errors are worth asking about.

Do the experience figures state what they are counted from? Years in practice and years as a specialist are different numbers, and a page quoting only the larger one without saying which it is has chosen the flattering reading. A page that gives both, and says which is which, has not.

Is the same surgeon named throughout? Clinics with several doctors sometimes publish credentials for one and describe procedures performed by another. Check that the name attached to the qualification is the name attached to the operation you are considering.

Do the numbers appear in more than one place, unchanged? A credential stated identically on the clinic's own pages, in its written replies, and on the individual article pages is a credential the clinic has committed to repeatedly. One that appears only in a private message is a credential with a single point of failure.

None of these checks requires Korean, a lookup service, or any special access. They require reading two documents against each other, which is something you can do from anywhere.

A warning about scope

Two limits worth keeping in view, so that a verified number does not do more work than it should.

First, verifying credentials verifies credentials. It does not establish experience in your particular operation, whether the plan proposed to you is right, or who will actually be in the room. Those are separate questions, and they are covered separately.

Second, a qualification confirmed today is a fact about training, not a forecast. It tells you a standard was met. It does not tell you how a consultation will go, or whether you will be told when an operation is not advisable — which is, in the end, closer to what most patients say afterwards actually mattered.

Verify the numbers because they are cheap to verify and expensive to fake. Then spend your attention on the questions that do not have numeric answers.

About the medical reviewer

Dae-hee Han, MD — Board-Certified Plastic Surgeon (specialist certificate No. 2045, issued 3 March 2014; medical licence 00394, issued 26 February 2009). Master’s degree, Ajou University School of Medicine. Training at the Craniofacial Center, Chang Gung Memorial Hospital, Taiwan (2013), and the IFAAS Mini Fellowship, University of Florida, USA (2016). Three rhinoplasty papers published in SCIE-indexed international journals. More than 4,500 nose surgeries — Dr. Han’s career total from 2017 to 2025, counted from medical records. He carries out consultation, surgery and follow-up personally; fee guidance is given by the clinic’s consultation manager.

Last reviewed: 2026-08-15

Clinic information

Edition Plastic Surgery Clinic & Dermatology
6F, OPUS 407, 407 Gangnam-daero, Seocho-gu, Seoul 06614, Republic of Korea
One minute on foot from Gangnam Station Exit 10
Tel +82-2-591-0100 · editionprs@gmail.com
Consultation hours: Monday to Friday 10:00–19:00 · Saturday 10:00–17:00 · closed Sundays and public holidays

Disclaimer

Individual results may vary. Bleeding, infection, swelling, asymmetry, and scarring can occur. Please decide after a full consultation with a board-certified specialist.

This page is general medical information. It is not a diagnosis, and it does not promise a particular outcome. Surgical fees are given after an in-person consultation.