During the past decade, the center of the world has moved from the West to the East, and the role of the Asia Pacific regions becomes more and more important. The time has come for Asia Pacific to unite and work together to reach overarching goals in the field of Dental Education.
While there are many schools with bilateral Memoranda of Understanding (MoU) to facilitate the exchange of students, there is otherwise little cohesiveness within the dental curriculum/education and no journal, like the Journal of Dental Education or the European Journal of Dental Education, is available for our academics.
“Together we can go further“
— Prof Allen Ming-Lun Hsu, First President of ADEAP and organizer of Founders Committee
It is necessary to globalize the scope of cooperation to achieve the goals of
- improving the knowledge of dentistry by increased communication and exchange of scientific information,
- raising greater awareness of clinical dentistry and research, and
- improving oral health for all countries from around the globe.
In October 2018, Professor Allen Ming-Lun Hsu, Dean of the School of Dentistry at National Yang-Ming University Taipei, invited Dental Schools in the Asia Pacific region to Kaohsiung, Taiwan. On 19th October 2018, 16 attending deans and their representatives from 12 countries in the Asia Pacific region signed an MoU to create an Association for Dental Education, Asia Pacific which would encompass Asian Pacific countries, starting with South Korea, China, Japan, Taiwan, Australia and New Zealand. Participants discussed that competencies might vary among different generations of learners and might also different based on the learners and socio-economic and cultural status.
They agreed that the first steps to address these problems should include
(1) the establishment of core competencies,
(2) the exchange of ideas among different dental schools and countries and
(3) providing an outlet for scholarly activities, such as an annual conference and a journal.