Hong Kong needs a new “high quality” medical school that will have a “positive impact” on healthcare talent and innovation, the city’s health minister has said after three city universities started a race to tackle a staffing shortfall in the profession.
Secretary for Health Lo Chung-mau on Saturday said the new medical school must be fully prepared and ensure students would fulfil the standards of the city’s licensing council.
“Setting up the third medical school will have a positive impact on Hong Kong’s training of medical talent or even healthcare innovation,” he said after he was interviewed on a radio show.
“But I have to emphasise that we do not only need the third medical school but a third medical school that is good and with high quality.”
He added the government would continue to communicate with interested universities and build a mechanism to assess which proposals would be most suitable.
Lo said he hoped that a third medical school could also achieve a global ranking of 40th or higher, similar to, or better than, the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK).
The Post reported earlier this month that the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology was in discussions to create a medical school in the city with Imperial College London.
The University of Hong Kong (HKU) and CUHK also announced plans to launch a new medicine graduate programme.
Professor Wallace Lau Chak-sing, HKU’s dean of medicine, said he was confident the faculty could expand its annual intake of medical students from 295 up to 400 in time.
Polytechnic University and Baptist University have also signalled an interest in being home to a medical school.
Anthony Wu Ting-yuk, a former Hospital Authority chairman, said earlier that Hong Kong should set up its third medical school by 2027 and target first-degree holders to enlarge the candidate pool.
Hong Kong at present has two medical schools, one at HKU and the other at Chinese University.
Lo said the government must ensure proposals for a third medical school were “feasible” and examine whether a school could achieve its targets for training because of the huge resources being invested.
He said he was “very happy” to see three universities were interested in setting up a medical school.
Lo added, however, that it involved “complicated arrangements” and that it “was not possible to approve it with a few words”.
He said the authorities would need to “carefully assess” whether the proposals matched Hong Kong’s interests and whether candidates’ sources of students and teachers, campus, teaching hospital and curriculum were in line with Medical Council requirements.
“At the end of the day, there is something we have to understand – after the medical students complete their training in Hong Kong, will they be able to be registered locally?” Lo asked.
“They need to be approved by the Medical Council. It is not as simple as opening a medical school and training a few students.”
Lo said there were examples overseas where a new medical school could not be accredited and its students were unable to be registered, so they had to sit registration exams in other countries.
He emphasised that it would require careful planning and adequate preparation to establish a “good medical school”.
“We have to seriously consider what the best proposal is because it not only involves financial investment, but most importantly, it will utilise our rare and crucial educational resources,” he said.
Lo highlighted Chinese University’s medical school as an example of how “complicated” the process of opening a new institution could be.
He said it took six years to pass the proposal in the Legislative Council and another seven years before the medical school launched.
Lo added, before Chinese University’s teaching hospital Prince of Wales Hospital opened in 1984, three years after the medical school was established, its teaching staff had to set up their offices in cargo containers at United Christian Hospital.
