200 Congregation booklet_1701_Final

7 HKUMed has been deeply engaging and reengaging with the mainland, and picked up our pace and intensity given this exciting array of new developments. Let me report to you several examples. As one of nine members of the China Consortium of Elite Teaching Hospitals, HKU has played to Hong Kong’s firmly established strength in bridging between the West and the rest of the country. The mainland has often looked to America adapting many of its residency educational practices, which makes our British heritage particularly valuable because it gives a counterpoint. In fact, I just returned from leading a delegation of the Consortium to London that was eye-opening for representatives of these top institutions. On the fortieth anniversary of the country’s “reform and opening up” in which Hong Kong was formally acknowledged to have played a leading role by President Xi last month, HKUMed continues to lead from the front in the health and education sectors. On the topic of residency training, in a couple of weeks at HKU- Shenzhen Hospital, we will be co-organising a national train-the- trainer workshop for 450 national residency programme directors. This is the first, hopefully of many, such activities that are jointly presented with and in fact hosted by the Chinese Medical Doctor Association , which is the official body delegated to lead the national “5+3” reform. Upstream at the undergraduate education level, we are contributing to the national “poverty alleviation through health” effort. The latest example is a pioneering peer- to-peer co-learning experience between our students and those from Peking Union Medical College Together we launched the first Mainland Healthcare Field Study and Poverty Alleviation Programme in rural Shanxi between the two top medical schools in the country. We will be scaling this up in the coming summer, with the support of the National Health Commission. On the research front, I see enormous scope and potential for President Zhang Xiang’s vision of developing a national-level laboratory, which is in essence a major research institute with thousands of scientists from different cognate disciplines working together to crack the most difficult questions at the frontiers of knowledge. This would be a natural product of the Greater Bay Area innovation and technology hub idea. HKUMed is proactively contributing to this collective effort. I hope to be able to report progress soonest as we march forward. Watch this space! Celebrating Success Finally, congregation ceremonies are really about celebrating success. Much as I dislike international league tables and find them counter-productive at best and often misleading, I would be lying to you if I tell you that I pay it no attention. At the risk of succumbing to my own all too human frailty, let me report to you the happy news that according to the most recent Times Higher Education Supplement ranking of medical schools, formally the “clinical, pre-clinical and health” category, HKUMed is now the number two school in all of Asia and came 29th in the world, having surpassed the University of Tokyo and coming just after the National University of Singapore. At the individual level, our colleagues have continued to excel and their achievements have been duly recognised. There are as usual too many to enumerate here and instead I will refer you to the printed proceedings for details. I feel extremely fortunate to be working alongside such brilliant people every day. But I am actually most proud of those of you who will be filing past in a moment, our graduands. Your careers are only just beginning and may your future be even more exciting, fulfilling and successful than those of us sitting on stage applauding your graduation today. Borrowing from Maya Angelou’s inspirational verse from Still I Rise , let us recall your sweat and tears reading for your degree, and set our sights on the promised fulfilment as a health care professional: Leaving behind nights of terror and fear I rise Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear I rise Ladies and gentlemen, please rise and applaud the Class of 2018!