APAPHS

History and Rationale

Asia-Pacific Association for
Problem-Based Learning in Health Sciences

PBL, established more than fifty years ago in Canada as an educational philosophy to instill adult-learning, life-long learning and self-directed learning in a medical school, has increasingly been incorporated into academic curricula. It spread across health sciences in dentistry, nursing, occupational health, physiotherapy, etc. across North America and Europe.

For example, more than 50% of the Canadian medical schools and about 25% of the US medical schools have adopted PBL in medical education. It ranges from the full-fledge PBL curriculum originated at McMaster University in the late 1960s to the hybrid PBL model developed at Harvard University in the late 1980s. Medical schools in UK also started a widespread move toward a PBL curriculum since the 1995 publication of guidelines for “Tomorrow’s Doctor” by the General Medical Council.

An inevitable worldwide reform of education in Health Sciences is evident. However, the majority of the institutes in health sciences in the Asia-Pacific region remain deeply attached to the traditional curriculum, since it was imported from the West nearly a century ago. This traditional curriculum, despite regular remedial modifications over the past century, remains conceptually unaltered. It is still based on didactic teaching and rote learning. Teaching of basic sciences and its effective application to clinical practice remains largely digressed. The process of knowledge acquisition lags behind the rate of technological advancement and new discoveries. Attempts to cover this deficiency by offering more and more taught courses has resulted in congested curricula beyond reasonable digestion by students.

For the above reasons, adoption of the PBL concept in medical education and training of related health science professionals has been attempted in a number of institutes in this region with encouraging results. PBL is based on a holistic approach to education via integration, collaboration, self-management and self-discipline, which are also meritorious characteristics of many Asian cultures. Theoretically, it should be possible for PBL to flourish in Asian countries. Practically, to overcome the conservative barrier/resistance to innovative change in education in health sciences, such as PBL, and to effectively incorporate PBL in new curricula, we need a supportive forum to educate the academic public on the merits of PBL and its limitations. We need to learn from others who have successfully implemented PBL, whether in the Asia-Pacific region or from other parts of the world. We need to research on the value of PBL within the context of the development of economics, culture and politics among the Asia-Pacific countries.

The 1^st Asia-Pacific PBL conference (generic, not just Health Sciences) was held in Hong Kong in December 1999. In July 2000, the 1^st Symposium on Teaching and Learning in Higher Education was held in Singapore. It included a PBL symposium and a pre-conference PBL workshop. In November 2000, the PBL Committee of the Faculty of Medicine at the National University of Singapore (NUS), together with the Faculty of Dentistry and the Centre for Development of Teaching and Learning, organized the 1^st ASEAN Conference on PBL in Health Sciences. The conference was well attended by the academics and practitioners from the Asia-Pacific region. Due to this, the subsequent conference was renamed the 2^nd Asia-Pacific Conference on PBL in Health Sciences which was held in October 2001 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.. The 3^rd Asia-Pacific Conference on PBL in Health Sciences was held in November 2002 in Taipeh, Taiwan. It was at this meeting that it was decided that our Association Conference on PBL in Health Sciences would be held once in two years. Learning about PBL in health sciences via a shared vision in a cooperative forum will also attest to the value of PBL in any learning process at large.