The Asia-Pacific Academic Consortium for Public Health (APACPH) first founded in Hawaii in 1984, is now an internationally independent non-profit corporation. The APACPH conference is held annually in the host country of an APACPH member institution. These conferences attract many high quality scientific research reports while addressing emerging health problems, share information and create opportunities to discuss new solutions which are most appropriate to different countries.  Therefore, such conferences always draw concerns and interest from scientists around the world.

The Hanoi School of Public Health (HSPH) gained its official membership from APACPH in 1990 and has been considered as a fast and strong growing training and research institution in recent years. Contributions made by HSPH to the APACPH community have been highly appreciated through direct interactions undertaken during the course of contacts and working. Thus, the APACPH Directorate has suggested HSPH to be the host for the 40th APACPH Annual Conference in late 2008 - an exemplary case of a fast growing, clear orientation and success for an institution.

An estimated 5 million people are killed worldwide because of injury each year and as many as 50 million more are injured. In the last few years, a number of injury prevention activities have been initiated in many Asia countries. The 2nd Asia Pacific Injury Prevention (APIP) Conference responds to the needs of a synthesis of evidence and lessons learnt from Asian countries and calls to bring collaborative action on injury prevention in this region to a higher level.

The idea of integrating two international conferences into one conference with the topic of applying Public Health in injury prevention has thus been initiated since then. This has met with favourable acceptance in Vietnam and the public health community.