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6 Given the burgeoning size and scope of the Faculty, and the anticipated expansion on all fronts in the coming few years, we have just concluded a global search for a newly established full-time Executive Associate Deanship (EAD) in Strategy and Operations, as approved by the University’s Senior Management Team. The EAD will provide strategic leadership and administrative oversight for budget and finance, resources management, information technology and other support services. The incumbent will also be responsible for optimising the Faculty’s operational efficiency in the increasingly competitive higher education environment nationally and internationally, in tandem with the University’s SMARTER initiative. At the School level, we have recently completed a worldwide search for the inaugural director of the School of Biomedical Sciences. As some of you will remember, this exercise has taken much longer than we had anticipated or wished. As the Chinese saying goes, or paraphrasing the English idiom “good people come to those who wait”, we are now completing the appointment procedure for a superb candidate. It is even more pleasing that both the incoming EAD and SBMS Director are members of the fairer sex, extending the Faculty’s proud tradition of having excellent women leaders. I am looking forward to welcoming them in the first half of the coming year. As new members of the Faculty leadership are about to join the team, we will be bidding farewell to Professor Lao Lixing who directs the School of Chinese Medicine. Lixing will be retiring back to America to join his family with our best wishes come next October. Therefore, there is now a global search for his successor. In the coming year at the programmatic level, the human capital and clinical affairs deaneries will be jointly working on establishing a Clinical Academic Career Office to specifically nurture and serve the next generation of young clinician- scientists. The programme will focus on appropriate mentorship, career development on national and international platforms, more competitive terms and conditions of service relative to the Hospital Authority as well as overseas counterparts, and robust but fair tenure and promotion policy and procedures. Further upstream, while we have now generally refrained from hiring new clinical trainees into the professoriate until after they have completed specialty training, in order to give as wide an exposure as possible to HA trainees considering an academic career, we would nonetheless offer a year-long Academic Clinical Fellowship scheme for those who show outstanding promise for a clinician-scientist career during their specialty training. Infrastructure and Capital Projects Over the past decade, the number of first-year-first-degree (FYFD) MBBS places has expanded by almost 90%. For the next two triennia, there will be further increases in our annual intake to both the medical and nursing programmes. Government has also indicated that we should plan for continued expansion up to the 2031-34 triennium. Accordingly, we have initiated the Sassoon Road campus redevelopment master plan to accommodate the consequential teaching and research needs. For those of you who live around the medical campus or have visited recently, you will see that protective scaffolding has gone up at 3 Sassoon Road for the demolition of the old Hospital Authority laundry, making way for the new home of the School of Nursing and School of Chinese Medicine. Starting next week, colleagues who drive to work will find the number of parking spaces markedly reduced at 21 Sassoon Road as construction workers begin the New Annex project. Both projects are slated for completion by the end of 2022 and ready for use in the first half of 2023. Further, following a site visit by the Financial Secretary and the Secretary for Food and Health this summer, we were invited to submit a capital works programme for consideration. We understand that it has been endorsed subject to funding approval by the legislature. Specifically, dealing with the impending influx of more students and therefore staff in the immediate to short term, we plan to remodel existing space in the Faculty of Medicine Building at 21 Sassoon Road, in addition to the New Annex project; and to implement pervasive virtual and artificial reality-enabled information technology across the various teaching venues on Sassoon Road and at Queen Mary Hospital. Then in the medium term, we are looking to construct a Clinical Training Amenities Centre at 6 Sassoon Road that would provide a total of 700 residential places and a learning commons to cater for medical and nursing students undergoing bedside training at Queen Mary, as well as a new Academic Building next to the new School of Nursing at 3 Sassoon Road. We are drawing up longer term plans to redevelop the rest of Sassoon Road to complete the medical campus transformation envisioned on our 130th anniversary. Hopefully by our 140th birthday, most of these capital projects would have borne fruit and become operational. In the meantime however, those of us working on Sassoon Road will have to live in a semi-permanent construction zone for the coming decade. Borrowing from an old MTR advert: Healthy China 2030, Greater Bay Area and the Belt and Road Initiative Next year marks a decade since the national deepening health system reform was launched in 2009. In 2012, the Ministries of Education and Health (now the National Health Commission) jointly promulgated a plan to standardise medical training under a new “5+3” framework that has been subsequently implemented nationwide since 2015. President Xi Jinping in a landmark speech articulated the Healthy China 2030 vision in 2016, setting out our country’s strategic position vis-à-vis the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and specifically the ideal of universal health coverage that the World Health Organisation has been advocating. One should of course view these recent national developments in the health sector against the broader geopolitical background of the Belt and Road Initiative launched in 2013, and the reconceptualization of our regional development strategy as the Greater Bay Area since 2017.