"Saving Lives Matters More Than Announcing Measures"... Prime Minister Han Urges Integration of Data for Suicide Prevention

Objective Analysis of Declining Suicide Rates Ordered
Establishing an Integrated Administrative Data and AI-Based Targeted Support System

The government has embarked on establishing a customized suicide prevention system that integrates and analyzes data dispersed across various agencies, employing artificial intelligence (AI) to precisely identify and support high-risk groups.

On September 22, Prime Minister Hansung-sook presided over the First Life Protectors Policy Roundtable, discussing data utilization strategies with suicide prevention experts and officials from the Ministry of Data and Statistics. Prime Minister Han instructed that the causes for the recent decrease in suicide deaths be assessed objectively, and called for the government to focus its resources on policies with proven effectiveness.

Prime Minister Han Sung-sook is presiding over the Cabinet meeting held at the Sejong Government Complex in Sejong City on the 22nd. Photo by Yonhap News

The prime minister emphasized, “It is important to objectively analyze why suicide deaths have recently decreased and the extent to which government policies have contributed, so that we can focus efforts on policies whose effectiveness has been confirmed and swiftly supplement areas where policies are lacking. From the outset, data design should be approached with consideration for how each policy will utilize it, and agencies should actively connect and share scattered data to enhance its usefulness.”

This method of integrated analysis of administrative data is a technological approach that connects fragmented signals of individual crises, which are scattered across multiple agencies such as health, welfare, and employment, to proactively identify high-risk groups. Applying AI technology further enables the rapid detection of suicide risk patterns within accumulated big data, thereby allowing for the creation of a system that automatically links individuals to necessary welfare services or professional counseling.

Prime Minister Han added, “It is not how many countermeasures the central government has announced that matters, but rather how many lives have actually been saved on the ground,” and requested, “Please ensure that data translates into policies that genuinely protect lives until the very end.”

During the roundtable, specific action items were discussed, including improvements to the risk factor classification system, expansion of trend data sharing, and analysis of causes and pathways using administrative data, all based on empirical analyses of the recent decline in suicide deaths. The government plans to further refine the risk factor classification system and to establish infrastructure enabling AI-based analysis results to be immediately linked to on-site support policies.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.