President's Message

Dear fellow colleagues and friends,

It is with great pleasure for me to be able to serve you as the President of the elected Executive Committee for the term of office 2006 ?? 2007. I like to thank everyone for their kind support and encouragement and especially the past president Dr Lim Kheng Ann and the past EXCO members (Dr Goh Wee Ser, Dr Andrew Tay, Dr Low Peng Koon, Dr Chan Siew Luen, Dr Ho Kok Sen, Dr Aidan Yeo .. to name a few) who had contributed enormously to the development of the association during their term of office over the last few years. We are now in cyberspace with a dedicated website whereby it would be used as an important portal of communication between the public and members of the association.  I would encourage everyone to log onto the website for information of events and notices and in fact to contribute to the development of this important facet of our association. The website will be your voice to us and we will be putting up issues for discussion and online surveys to obtain consensus from you. Please do support the site.

The AOMSS will continue with its original aim of serving the interests of its members and promote the development of the OMFS specialty in Singapore with enhancement of surgical patient care through furthering of education both for the general public and the specialty members. We will be facing new challenges ahead with the imminent parliamentary enactment of the dental specialist register which demand for high standards of professional practice. Continuing education of the oral and maxillofacial surgeons in Singapore will become all the more important and the AOMSS will have a pivotal role in the provision of educational courses for the core CDE points for our surgeons and compliment the educational activity of our institutions. To enhance patient care, public education is very important and the profession as a whole has this duty to the public. The AOMSS will be our mouthpiece for public education and for starters there are plans in the pipeline to increase mouth cancer awareness through the introduction of the ??Mouth Cancer Awareness Week? like our colleagues in the UK and many parts of the Western world. We will probably tie up this with our other dental colleagues as part of overall oral health care promotion. I will put up more information on the website soon.

More importantly I would encourage the younger generation of surgeons to show their support and participation in running these activities as the future of our specialty depends on them. We are very fortunate to have recruited promising young surgeons to help with our CDE programmes and every member is encouraged to help in anyway you can with ideas and participation of these activities. Just to name a few, we are in the stages of planning for the Annual Clinical Symposium with the theme ??Advanced Techniques in Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery? which we hope would also attract regional participants from around us. Tentatively we plan to introduce the techniques for piezosurgery for ridge augmentations and implants and arthroscopy for tmj and other maxillofacial procedures. For those of you wanting to renew your ACLS and ATLS certifications, we will be organizing the same courses again. There will be a cadaveric dissection course on clinical anatomy of the maxillofacial skeleton and I would urge interested members to register with me as the number of places are restricted to 10 only. We also plan to have a cadaveric dental implant course which again can accommodate only limited numbers. The list of other CDE events would be published in the website and AOMSS members will enjoy discounts in fees and in some cases free as a special perk. To encourage the spirit of continuing education, the AOMSS will for the first time on a trial basis, sponsor partly its members to some designated meetings and conferences and I urge all of you to apply for these. As funds are limited, it will be on a competitive basis and only for a few select courses/meetings. The aim of this is to ignite interests in continuing education and training development of our members for higher professional standards. With more activities in CDE courses and regional/international meetings, there may be more money for such sponsored activities for the future. It is with this that we hope that we may even develop fellowships for members to develop special skills if we have sufficient funding. Through the sponsoring of educational programs, fellowships or even research activities, the AOMSS is providing a service to not only the members of the association but to the profession at large and this is one way I believe we ??give back the money??s worth? to our members.  Please look in the website for further details.

It is my belief that as a professional association we must also foster closer social interaction amongst our members and hence an important element of AOMSS activities would be to have fun as well besides education. I would welcome ideas on how we can help in this aspect of association activities. We should also link up with our fellow colleagues and members of similar associations of neighbouring countries to cement the ties and posture Singapore regionally as a centre of oral and maxillofacial surgery. I have personally met the presidents of the specialty associations in the Asia Pacific region 

( China, Philipines, Thailand, Hong Kong, Japan, Indonesia, South Africa, Australia ) and we are planning to link up our continuing education programmes regionally.

In the international arena, I have discussed at great lengths with both the Executive Director ,Dr John Helfrick and President, Dr John Williams of IAOMS (International Association of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeons) who have both pledged their support to help Singapore develop our specialty in the region. We intend to be much more active in the participation of Singapore in the IAOMS as we have now appointed Dr Poon Choy Yoke as the association??s counselor to the IAOMS.   I have never seen a more exciting time than now for the specialty with all the activities both regionally and internationally and with this I hope all of you would continue to support the association and its activities.

We have tentatively scheduled our next Annual General Meeting to be on  20^th January 2007 with Mr John Williams (Maxillofacial Trauma) speaking in the meeting and this would be at a hotel location with good food and wine for a evening of fun and business. Do mark this on your diary and come along !!

Sincerely,

Victor Fan

MB BCH, BDS, FDSRCS(Eng), FRCS(Eng), FRCS(OMFS), FAMS

President,

Association of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeons (Singapore).