APEC's High-Level Meeting on Health and the Economy is the forum where the region's health and finance authorities align on how health and economic policy reinforce one another across 21 member economies. In 2025, Korea hosted the 15th edition, held in Seoul on 16 September under the theme "Connect, Innovate, Prosper: Building a Healthy, Smart and Aging-Responsive Society" and chaired by Korea's Minister of Health and Welfare. Junghwan Park led the Planning Team responsible for delivering the meeting and its outcomes.
The substantive core of the meeting was a Joint Ministerial Statement adopted by participating economies, guided by APEC's Putrajaya Vision 2040 and the Aotearoa Plan of Action. The statement spanned a deliberately broad agenda: addressing demographic challenges including low birth rates and rapid population aging through healthy and active aging; reaffirming support for access to high-quality essential health services for all; harnessing digital health and artificial intelligence for prevention, diagnosis, and care delivery while stressing interoperability, privacy protection, security, and the digital literacy of health workers; expanding community-based mental health services and reducing stigma; building community-based care that integrates medical care, long-term care, and daily-living support; strengthening supply-chain resilience through diversified sourcing and transparency; advancing cancer control including cervical-cancer elimination; and reinforcing public-health emergency preparedness through a multisectoral approach.
Park's role centered on the coordination that makes such an outcome possible. He led the planning team that built the agenda and ran the event, and he steered negotiation of the Joint Ministerial Statement — the diplomatic work of reconciling the positions of diverse economies into consensus language that all could adopt. Producing an agreed statement across this many priority areas, in a forum that operates by consensus, requires sustained drafting, bilateral and plenary negotiation, and careful management of competing interests.
He also organized the third Senior Officials' Meeting (SOM-3), part of the preparatory track through which officials build the groundwork for ministers' decisions. The significance of the work is twofold. For Korea, hosting and chairing a successful APEC health meeting and securing an adopted statement is an exercise of regional convening power and health diplomacy. For the region, the statement set a shared agenda on the defining health-economy challenges of the era — aging societies, digital and AI-enabled health systems, resilient supply chains, and mental health — giving 21 economies a common reference point for cooperation.