It has been revealed that the healthy life expectancy of Koreans, which peaked at 70.9 years in 2020, has declined for three consecutive years, reaching 68.6 years in 2023. On September 30, the Ministry of Health and Welfare and the Korea Health Promotion Institute held the Future Health Strategy Forum under the theme “Health for All: Evidence-Based Design” at Melon Hall in Yangjae L-Tower, Seoul, to discuss ways to utilize health data and statistics in policy-making.
The Future Health Strategy Forum, which has been held since 2021, serves as a platform for experts and the public to discuss current health policy issues together. This year, it is being held as a four-part series under the overarching theme of “Health for All.” The first forum in September addressed health policy priorities based on evidence; the October session focused on bridging health disparities; the November session addressed gaps in health policy; and the December session will cover new health risks that must be addressed for future generations.
Lee Don-hyung, Director of the Health Promotion Research Institute at the Korea Health Promotion Institute, delivered the opening presentation and introduced the system for calculating and managing healthy life expectancy. Healthy life expectancy—life expectancy minus the period spent suffering from illness—stood at 68.6 years in 2023, a decrease of 1.3 years from the previous year. After peaking at 70.9 years in 2020, it has declined for three consecutive years, prompting calls for policy responses.
Oh Gyeong-won, Director of the Health and Nutrition Survey Analysis Division at the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency, explained the process of identifying the public’s health behaviors through large-scale health surveys—such as the Korea National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, which has been conducted on 10,000 participants since 1998, and the Community Health Survey, which has been conducted on 230,000 participants since 2008—and utilizing these findings to inform policy.
Shin Jeong-woo, Director of the Center for Healthcare Workforce Supply and Demand Projections at the Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs, compared South Korea’s health status internationally using health statistics from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). He projected that if current trends continue, health risks such as overweight and obesity will increase by 2032, and the share of current health care expenditures relative to gross domestic product (GDP) will rise sharply to the mid-10% range, exceeding the OECD average. Kim Jae-yong, Director of the Big Data Operations Office at the National Health Insurance Service, introduced the patterns of public health and healthcare utilization—as well as the potential for policy applications—that can be identified through approximately 609 billion records of health insurance big data.
In the subsequent panel discussion, chaired by Yoon Seok-jun, a professor in the Department of Preventive Medicine at Korea University College of Medicine, experts from academia and the media discussed the limitations and constraints of utilizing health data and statistics in policy-making, as well as the areas where health policy should focus its investment in the future.
Son Young-rae, Director of the Regional Essential Public Healthcare Division at the Ministry of Health and Welfare, “As the environment surrounding the public’s lives and health is changing rapidly, the challenges that health policy must address are also becoming increasingly complex and diverse,” he said. “Through this four-part forum, we will identify the key issues that health policy should focus on in the future and, based on this, devise effective measures to realize ‘health for all.’”
Kim Heon-ju, President of the Korea Health Promotion Institute, “Data and statistics supporting health policy—such as healthy life expectancy, various health surveys, international health statistics, and health insurance data—are steadily accumulating,” he said. “Now that the key challenge is to utilize and link these data sources more effectively, I hope this forum will serve as an opportunity to take evidence-based health policy to the next level.”
Participants can attend the forum in person by pre-registering, and it will also be livestreamed on the Korea Health Promotion Development Institute’s official YouTube channel.
