What must Hong Kong’s new medical school focus on to succeed?

The new medical school set to be run by the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) should ride on the institution’s unique technological strengths and catch up on clinical research to become a leading institution, experts and lawmakers have said.

Their comments followed the government’s announcement on Tuesday that HKUST had emerged as the top choice to operate the city’s third medical school, taking its place alongside the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) and the University of Hong Kong (HKU).

After eight months of decision-making, the final call was said to be the result of a consensus reached by a government task force consisting of top experts and co-chaired by the city’s health and education ministers.

Professor Nivritti Gajanan Patil, one of the task force’s 19 members and vice-dean of the Macau University of Science and Technology’s faculty of medicine, told the Post that the vetting process itself had been a challenging task.

“It’s probably 1,000 pages I have read. So it’s like reading a huge surgical book,” he said, with his estimate including the times that he had to read through the same papers multiple times.

Patil recalled how task force members had read a large volume of documents prepared by the three institutions, in addition to meeting each of the applicant universities twice and assessing each of the 10 parameters one by one.