Welcome to the 5th Singapore Public Health and Occupational Medicine Conference. The theme for the conference, “Evidence-Based Practice in Public Health and Occupational Medicine”, is timely as public health and occupational medicine professionals, researchers and policy-makers grapple with the need to base their practice on good evidence. Health technology assessment is a tool for evaluating healthcare interventions that can help bridge the gap between evidence and practice. It is therefore appropriate that the conference is being held jointly with the 4th Asian Regional Health Technology Assessment Conference.

Evidence-based practice requires a good understanding of the methods that can be used to harness the wealth of information in the public domain, and the techniques that are available for developing better research. To provide fellow professionals and practitioners with these tools, this year’s conference brings together an unprecedented number of international and local expert faculty members to deliver a wide array of workshops, discussions and symposia.

For the first time, a series of pre-conference workshops have been organised to provide participants with the opportunity to have focused learning experiences with our faculty; in addition, workshops will also be held during the two days of the conference. The programme of symposia will cover a variety of topical issues in public health, occupational medicine and health technology assessment.

I look forward to meeting you at the conference in Singapore, and hope that this conference will increase your knowledge and application of evidence-based practice.


Dr Vernon Lee
Chairman, Organising Committee