200 Congregation booklet_1701_Final

5 from sorting out water fountains to battling university bureaucracy in course requirements; but I do not mince words when unreasonable requests are pitched in an inappropriately confrontational way. I have gone into considerable detail about current priorities for the medical course. Rest assured that I have not forgotten about our other undergraduate programmes in biomedical sciences, Chinese medicine, nursing, pharmacy and the upcoming new addition of global health and development. MBBS, being our longest established flagship, has and will always set the bar for the other degrees to learn from, not only its successes but perhaps even more importantly its hard lessons in failure. In fact all these programmes are linked together through a Faculty-wide initiative in inter-professional education where students from the various disciplines take the same lectures and engage in small group peer learning together. They will need to work together on the wards soon enough so why not start during their student years? Clinical Service HKU Health System has now firmly established itself as the overarching governance platform for relations with our four affiliate teaching hospitals. Professor Joseph Lui who has directed its operations since its foundation now oversees the entire clinical affairs deanery, thereby personifying one-stop service in our integrated approach to engaging with clinical staff, health care organisations and patients. Allow me to take this opportunity to welcome Dr Teresa Li who has taken over from Dr CC Luk as Cluster Chief Executive for Hong Kong West and Hospital Chief Executive for Queen Mary Hospital. Her current move is indeed a homecoming for Teresa, who had spent a brief period working as an anaesthetist in our flagship hospital earlier in her career. We are actively contributing to the next iteration of Hong Kong West’s Clinical Services Plan, with a particular view to facilitating student teaching and learning especially given the increasingly larger numbers involved. Related to this, we are engaging with the Hospital Authority about the possibility of designating more teaching hospitals to accommodate this burgeoning need for clinical placement of medical and nursing students in the years to come. With the generous support of the Li Ka Shing Foundation, our eponymous donor, we will be launching the “Love Can Help” patient sponsorship scheme targeting those with uncommon conditions requiring ultra expensive therapies that can bring about catastrophic expenses even amongst the relatively well- to-do. This non-means tested pilot scheme is funded by a HKD17.5M donation in the first instance and will be rolled out at Queen Mary Hospital during the first quarter of 2019. Following Council’s resolution last December, HKU Health System has been given full authority for internal governance and control of the HKU-Shenzhen Hospital project. We have regular liaison meetings with the Hospital Chief Executive Professor CM Lo and his senior managers to sort financial and human resources issues as well as ensuring fiduciary compliance and above all unity of purpose. On the horizon, we are proactively exploring new opportunities arising from the strong and sustained support of the Greater Bay Area vision by the Central People’s Government, Hong Kong government and those at the provincial and local municipality levels. At Gleneagles Hong Kong (GHK), HKU Health System has been adding most value by pioneering the most robust clinical governance framework in the local private sector, that ranges from systematic privileges vetting and credentialing of individual practitioners to institution-level accreditation. After only 18 months in operation, GHK has already successfully completed the diagnostic readiness survey for ACHS accreditation, with the full organisation-wide survey for award of accreditation planned for the coming calendar year. Several specialties have been pioneering undergraduate teaching modules that best fit the private care environment and students’ learning needs. Hong Kong College of Anaesthesiologists became the first specialty college to recognise GHK as a satellite training site. There are a couple of other specialties that are undergoing evaluation currently. To prepare for the commissioning of Hong Kong Sanatorium & Hospital’s A Kung Ngam private cancer care facility, in addition to our own publicly operated academic cancer centre at Grantham Hospital, our clinical oncologists and cancer researchers have never had so many opportunities to prevent and treat the number one cause of death. Our overriding challenge is in filling capacity to treat patients, teach students, train residents and test new therapies – in a nutshell, to find sufficient numbers of qualified professoriate and professional staff to do all that we must. Finally, let me just quickly mention a couple of other hospital partners with whom we have been working during the current pre-commissioning phase, that is the Hong Kong Children’s Hospital and the Chinese Medicine Hospital. We will continue supporting these long-awaited specialty hospitals as they come on stream over the next few years. Human Capital This Congregation marks the beginning of my second term of office. With much good will and support of the professoriate, I was able to implement a healthy turnover of the deanery leadership team. Let me take this opportunity to thank Professors CS Lau, Law Wai-lun and Anskar Leung for their dedicated service during the past five years, and welcome their successors Professors Gilberto Leung, Joseph Lui and WK Leung joining as associate deans holding the respective portfolios of teaching and learning, clinical affairs and human capital. I also thank all retiring assistant deans of the various sub-deaneries whose work behind the scenes has kept the Faculty humming along smoothly, especially through our 130th anniversary. We took particular care to appoint the current cohort of assistant deans, which was part of a deliberate effort in grooming the next generation of academic leaders. We have also put in place a systematic rotation programme to allow these younger colleagues full exposure to the various deanery functions over the next few years.