Utilization of dental sessions at APAN conferences for education and community development

Abstract

The dental profession always expands its capabilities and contributes to advances in the quality of health services through scientific advancements and knowledge dissemination. Since 2016, the Faculty of Dental Medicine at Airlangga University has collaborated with the Telemedicine Development Center of Asia (TEMDEC) at Kyushu University Hospital to organize a webinar at a session on the Asia-Pacific Advanced Network (APAN). The session was a dental session, which was originally designed to promote remote medical education. This program aims to improve the quality of dental education and is conducted regularly, twice a year. After the COVID-19 pandemic ended in 2021, we innovated to expand this program from online to hybrid-based, so that audiences could also attend in person. With adequate promotion, the number of audiences increases rapidly. We are also expanding the benefits of this program beyond improving the quality of dental education; it also provides knowledge dissemination and empowers Indonesian dentists. Thus, this program also delivers community development as an additional essential output. This paper summarizes all activities of dental sessions at APAN conferences and shows how they also produce other outputs in accordance with institutional performance targets, including strengthening collaboration between connected institutions and the resultant outcome in terms of inbound staff, outbound staff, and outbound students.