- Student & Alumni Corner
- Expressions Winter 2023
Alumni News
How our dental graduates impact their communities
Dr Flora Wai Ling Chan
President, Society of Preventive Dentistry of Hong Kong
It is my great honour to serve as the President of the Society of Preventive Dentistry of Hong Kong (SPDHK). The SPDHK has strived and attended a number of milestones, making a name of its own. Being a member of this family and witnessing its growth has been a very exciting while encouraging experience for me.
Prevention in oral health is an important public health agenda. The World Health Organisation expressed its goal of universal coverage for oral health by the year 2030. Prevention is certainly a crucial pillar that supports this goal, as the burden of oral disease would become unbearably high without prevention, coupled with the trend of a global ageing population and the prevalence of non-communicable lifestyle diseases such as diabetes and cardiovascular diseases. The importance of prevention has been a long understood and convincing idea but to advocate prevention by placing it in the spotlight and building our healthcare system and its strategies around its concepts is certainly a breakthrough of the modern healthcare system.
Therefore, the SPDHK will work hard to promote preventive dentistry by fostering an environment which encourages prevention within the profession and hope to act as a bridge to bring together different entities to work together to effectively prevent oral diseases. We will also continue our work in the community as a charity to improve the oral health of the city. We are glad to be given such a privilege, and with the continuous support of our members, we are certain that we can achieve a lot more in the coming years.
Dr Janet Cheng
Private Practice
BDS to me has been a rollercoaster: it was the first time where my efforts were greatly disproportionate to the results, found that talent did give people an edge clinically that I envied, and learned that textbooks can often be outdated due to new research.
However, it was also where I found a bunch of friends that I could remain hopeful with no matter how dreadful the day went. Especially as classes were disrupted by COVID-19, I would also not have graduated without the generous sharing of cases, knowledge and clinical sessions from my classmates, the tutors who taught me how to formulate treatment plans and how to carry out procedures clinically, the dental technicians who worked extremely hard to complete our cases timely, the dental surgery assistants who put up with our pace and sometimes working overtime, our patients that were truly so patient with their dental treatment, the administrative staff for helping us manage our patients and folders, support from Dental Christian Fellowship and many more that if I wrote, would fill more than all the pages of this newsletter.
As a newly graduated dentist in the private sector, although there are times of doubt, I am confident to say that BDS is the strongest backbone of my workdays. I am also very grateful for the guidance and invaluable advice of the experienced dentists around me. Dentistry is an ever-growing body of knowledge, and I am excited to continue learning as a dentist.
Dr Stephanie Chu
Training Support Dental Officer at PPDH
I have often been asked the question by both BDS and classmates, “You have spent 6 years at The Prince Philip Dental Hospital (PPDH) - why do you choose to stay at the hospital full-time after graduation?”
Although within the same building and setting, working as a Training Support Dental Officer (TSDO) has been a very helpful transition from student life to independent practice. In fact, the experience is completely different from that of being an undergraduate student. The BDS experience focuses on providing key foundational skills of dental practice, where clinical procedures are heavily dependent on the guidance of supervisors and tutors. As a TSDO, there is a greater ownership in clinical decision making and my own time management, as I enjoy the freedom to explore a variety of treatment options and treatment planning with my patient. At the same time, there is always access to seniors and staff within the hospital, with a shift in dynamics from a student-teacher relationship to a mentor-mentee relationship as we work side by side as colleagues serving patients. This also allows me to learn from various specialties and obtain expert opinions from different specialists, in order to provide the best treatment for my patients through a collective and interdisciplinary approach.
Dr Jade Kei Ki
Dental Officer at the Department of Health
I just graduated from the Faculty of Dentistry, HKU in 2023. I am currently a Dental Officer at the Department of Health. This year, new graduates were assigned to work in rotations, including the Civil Servants Dental Services, Hospital Dental Service and School Dental Care Service. I was thankful to be given an opportunity to start my first rotation at Queen Elizabeth Hospital’s Oral Maxillofacial Surgery & Dental Clinic.
easy task as there were quite a lot of cases I have never come across during my BDS years. I welcomed the challenges and was grateful to my seniors and colleagues for their uncountable and tremendous support who genuinely led me to the right track. I will not be ashamed to say “I know not”, nor will I fail to call in my colleagues when the skills of another are needed for a patient’s recovery.
I would like to take this opportunity to thank the teaching staff at HKU, who helped me build a solid foundation in my BDS years. Looking back, I valued the rewarding studies at HKU that allowed me to develop my career as a dentist. On a professional basis, I would remind myself to stay humble and most importantly, to place my patients’ benefits in the first place and to take care of them with warmth and sympathy.
