Prof Philip Poi Jun Hua trained at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland and graduated in 1981. He was conferred with LRCP & S (Ireland) and MB, BCh, BAO from the National University of Ireland. Prof Poi obtained the Membership of the Royal College of Physicians in Ireland in 1986 and trained in Geriatric Medicine at Oxford, St Bartholomew’s, London and Southampton before returning to Malaysia.
Having contributed to the development of a new geriatric unit in University Malaya Medical Centre, the first purpose-built ward for acutely ill elderly patients in Malaysia, Prof Poi is in the Ministry of Health’s Technical Committee for the National Healthcare for the Elderly program, which is involved in policy-making decisions concerning elderly care and in training their trainers to improve the quality of health care delivery to all elderly Malaysians.
Supervising undergraduate and postgraduate students in University Malaya, he is also actively involved in lectures, research, and consultancy. Prof Poi has contributed to chapters in several medical textbooks, clinical practice guidelines (in Dementia and osteoarthritis), and has had articles published in several medical journals and in the popular press. He has been an invited speaker in many Asia Pacific conferences and has spoken in symposiums at the recent European Union Geriatric Medicine conferences in Europe.
A former Vice-President of the Gerontological Association of Malaysia, he is the current President of the Malaysian Society of Geriatric Medicine and continues to be a long-serving executive committee member and medical advisor of the Alzheimer’s Disease Foundation of Malaysia. Over the past 10 years, as a founding member of the Asia Pacific Geriatric Network, he has helped to create an informal but important network amongst the leading geriatricians in the region. This has resulted in Asia Pacific Geriatric Conferences organized annually since 2006 in different countries and has helped our trainee Geriatricians gain exposure to different care delivery systems in various countries.