Often found at theaters and museums, Kwon Mee-yoo has covered a wide range of cultural fields from K-pop and dramas to theater and fine art for over a decade. Now as K-Culture Desk editor, she tries to connect Korean culture with global readers through fresh perspectives.
Ubiquitous Healthy City conference in Gangnam
By Kwon Mee-yoo
The Gangnam District Office is hosting a four-day conference on the promotion of healthcare and medical services among domestic and international cities until Friday at Coex.
The fourth global conference of the Alliance for Healthy Cities (AFHC) highlights policies for a “Ubiquitous Healthy City” and the district of Gangnam will promote state-of-the-art technologies offered in the area enabling citizens to get medical services ubiquitously.
AFHC is a group of Western Pacific cities collectively aiming at the care and promotion of their citizen’s health. Founded in 2004, 158 cities from 11 countries participate in the alliance, holding a general assembly every two years.
This year the host district will take the participants to the Yangjae Stream U-Health Park. The park is equipped with RFID (Radio-Frequency IDentification) technology and visitors to the park can register their information at the visitor’s center.
After registration, the center provides healthcare services based on each person’s regular amount of exercise, collected automatically.
For the future, district chief Shin Yeon-hee said the ward plans to promote medical tourism to a greater degree.
“We will invigorate the medical tourism industry and plan to treat 65,000 foreign patients by 2013,” Shin said.
The southern district has some 2,160 clinics, which accounts for 14 percent of the total medical institutions in Seoul.
The ward attracted 16,000 international patients last year, about 27 percent of the total medical visitors to Korea.