The Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) 2024 First Senior Officials’ Meeting and Related Meetings in Lima, Peru, marked a significant milestone for public-private partnerships, as well as for ensuring health care delivery to the people across the APEC region. On March 5, 2024, all 21 APEC member economies reached consensus in endorsing the Terms of Reference for the Regulatory Harmonization Steering Committee (RHSC) of Medical Products, after a two-year pause. The RHSC is a network of experts from regulatory agencies, industry, academia, and standards development organizations facilitating cooperation among medical product regulatory authorities. It aims to achieve this by building human capacity in regulatory science among medical product regulatory staff.
During the 2023 U.S. APEC host year we sought to strengthen primary health care and its linkages to pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response, advance innovation in digital health, and strengthen gender and health equity in the economy. The RHSC’s optimistic future underscores the critical importance the U.S. APEC host year played in reinvigorating this important and life-saving work. Such achievement has been made possible because of the exemplary interagency collaboration among the Department of State, Department of Health and Human Services, Food and Drug Administration, and Office of the United States Trade Representative, and a whole-of-government effort to continue furthering APEC’s work spanning a wide range of policy domains within health and the economy.
For further information, please contact the U.S. APEC Team at DOSAPEC@state.gov.
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