V23I1 Special

5 medical benefits remain less favourable. The notional workload allocation of 55% clinical duty for clinician-scientists, as well as 10% teaching and research responsibility for Hospital Authority staff at the teaching hospitals must be universally respected and robustly enforced. Even for superstars, the day only spans 24 hours. To support our academic colleagues, we have made a determined effort to bolster the administrative establishment. They have for far too long been an afterthought, although anyone who works in universities will tell you that they are actually the people who make the whole place tick. Of course, as a mostly publicly funded institution, we must be accountable for justifying this overdue expansion of our support infrastructure. Here the Executive Vice President’s SMARTER@HKU programme provides a timely complement, identifying and implementing efficiency improvements to finance this and other initiatives. On research and discovery, our philosophy has always been to provide the best hardware and software infrastructure, within a flexible and facilitative environment, to a community of the most brilliant minds then leave them to work their innovative magic. In particular the research deanery constantly reminds itself that the best laid plans rarely pan out and that scientific serendipity springs from curious and wandering minds. Managers of research must desist from actually managing research, rather positive non-interventionism must be our guide after having satisfied the most robust and stringent ethical and fiduciary oversight. Therefore, we have focused on expanding core technology platforms particularly growing our –omics capabilities, small animal competencies and clinical trials facilities. To complement the investment in facilities and equipment, we continue to grow our core expertise in bioinformatics, biostatistics and clinical research methodologies. More recently, in tandem with the territory-wide shift towards a more entrepreneurial orientation in biomedical research, and inspired by the demonstrated success of Shenzhen in the digital economy as well as for startups generally, members of the Faculty have also engaged more deeply and frequently with industrial partners in co- developing devices, new vaccination strategies and the like. Over the past decade and a half, the Faculty has matured from designating virtual research hubs and nurtured them into internationally recognised centres of excellence. The coming decade will hopefully see further consolidation in our lead in these areas of infection, cancer, biopharmaceuticals, stem cell and developmental biology, and global health. We also anticipate the emergence of newer fields that perhaps we cannot yet foresee. As such our research policy will always remain nimble and proactive in supporting nascent as well as established areas of enquiry. One of the most exciting projects of our 130th anniversary is the MBBS 130 curriculum. The centrepiece is of course the Enrichment Year. Essentially it is our response, as a school practising undergraduate medical entry, to reap the benefits of a graduate entry system wherein incoming students would already have had a more broadly based and varied set of exposures at the tertiary level. At the same time it also lends the opportunity for aspiring students to pursue research, without the immediate time penalty associated with a more conventional MD-PhD track at enrolment. Furthermore, this Year is particularly important for the relatively much younger (compared to the case in North America and other graduate entrants in the UK and Australia) and really high-performing students in our context. The restrictive licensing regime in place since repatriation in 1997 has effectively made supply much less flexible thus wages disproportionately higher and therefore entry into the profession even more competitive, while at the same time all aspiring students converge on the two local schools. The Enrichment Year gives them the broadening worldview and an outlet for their tremendous energy to learn. It is a truly innovative experiment as I am unaware of another school that has tried such an approach. I hope to share our experience, that is failures as well as successes, more widely with colleagues around the world as we move forward, and in turn learn from our peers how to constantly improve our curricular offering. I am also very proud of the success of our BBiomedSc programme, that has over the last five years become one of the most desired choices for high school leavers with entrance scores just shy of our flagship MBBS course. Of particular note, the exchange cum articulation with Edinburgh, Sydney and UC Berkeley in veterinary surgery, physiotherapy, radiography and public health have proved a major attraction. I thank their respective leaders for joining us in the platform party this afternoon. To enhance pastoral care, together with the various student societies, we have jointly appointed two social workers to improve student wellbeing, to provide support and to intervene at the earliest signs of distress. There is to be a “China wall” in the work of these colleagues who are explicitly instructed not to divulge confidential information to the Faculty so as to create and maintain a safe environment for students to freely share their feelings and thoughts. We continue to look for a full-time clinical psychologist to join this team. The impact of our human capital development work radiates