Dr. SOEURN Visal
Dental students need to learn about how to manage patients with complex medical conditions, as well as geriatric patients and patients with physical, psychological and developmental disorders. Currently Cambodia has no specialists in this area of dentistry called “Special Care Dentistry”.
Hence we were very happy to accept an offer to help teach our students from two overseas specialists – Associate Professor Dr Mas Suryalis Ahmad from UiTM University in Malaysia, and Dr Olivia Apperley from New Zealand. Dr Olivia has been to Cambodia and taught our students before, and helped us to provide treatment for a group of children with hemophilia when she was here. A/Professor Suryalis has a Doctor of Clinical Dentistry and a PhD in Special Needs Dentistry from the University of Melbourne. She was able to teach our students online, using a similar curriculum to that used at her own university UiTM. Dr Olivia, who works in a major hospital in NZ, has many years of experience, which she is sharing with our year 5 students this semester. Our own Dr Tort Borany who has a Masters in Preventive Dentistry from Korea is also teaching in the course, focusing on geriatric dentistry.
cUP is grateful for the cooperation and support it gets from its many overseas partners, as we try to provide our students with the best education possible. We hope to continue to strenthen our links with UiTM, and several of their lecturers have helped us in recent years, and we hope to send groups of our students there again for an exchange program in future years.
