2018/10/17 2018 APACPH Annual Meeting, Symposium 6: Health Promotion and Capacity Building

The 50th APACPH Conference was hosted jointly by the Universiti Malaysia Sabah and APACPH on the 12-14 September 2018 at the Universiti Malaysia Sabah, Kota Kinabalu, Sabah.  APACPH has been working for the betterment of community and achieve the highest possible level of health of all the people of the nations of the Asia-Pacific region.  The Mission of the Consortium is to enhance Regional capacity to improve the quality of life and to address major public health challenges through the delivery of education, research and population health services by member institutions.  The theme for this year's conference was a milestone event – moving forward to address new challenges in regional health. 

One of APACPH most recent initiatives was the newly formed APACPH Collaborating Centers for Health Promotion (CCHP), which is directly under the lead of Taipei Medical University and Taiwan Ministry of Health& Welfare.  APACPH CCHP will be hosting the Asia Pacific Health Promotion Capacity Building Workshop from October 30th to November 3rd, 2018.  Several key lecturers, Prof Masamine Jimba, Prof Bruce Maycock, and Dr. Wah Yun Low from APACPH, were invited to develop the training program curriculum and also to deliver some lecturers during this training workshop.  This time at the 50th APACPH annual meeting , Dr. Jimba (President of APCPH), Dr. Wah Yun Low (APACPH President-Elect), Dr. Bruce Maycock (APACPH Secretary-General), and Dr. Teo Yik Ying (Dean of Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health at National University of Singapore) all commented that CCHP program is a good role model for future APACPH activities as this program serves as a linkage between academic professionals and the government officials. 

The forum hosted by Taipei Medical University this time was Symposium 6: Health Promotion and Capacity Building.  There were four distinguished speakers for this symposium and the common themes here were to develop the capacity building for different public health burdens (i.e. Chronic diseases, tobacco control) as well as showing some Health Promotion initiatives in different countries.    Professor Brruce Maycock from Curtin University, Australia presented on the topic of “Building capacity for global, national and local health promotions".  Professor Ying-Wei Wang from Taiwan Ministry of Health spoke about "Investing in Organizationl Capacity Building for Chronic Disease Prevention".  Professor Li-Ling Huang from Taipei University presented on the topic of "Developing National Capacity for Tobacco Control: experience from Taiwan".  Dr. Wah-Yun Low from University of Malaya spoke on "Partnerships in health Promotion: The Malaysian experience".   Overall, this forum provided a great opportunity for participants to learn about successful health promotion programs/initiatives and how exactly the program was implemented and the potential challenges.